[Liverpool] Open war: MySQL community vs. Oracle/Sun's mobilization campaign

[Simon Johnson]

People have probably already seen this on twitter but just in case....
>
> It appears Oracle has mobilized customers to write letters to the
> Commission and basically dictated the content by telephone. Based on
> what we heard from at least one such customer, Oracle apparently tried
> to particularly appeal to customers who also use Java and/or Sun
> hardware, and Oracle basically tried to capitalize on customer
> concerns about Sun's overall future in case the deal falls through,
> while the European Commission's concerns are only about MySQL, not
> about the rest of Sun. Monty just wants a solution for MySQL (the
> simplest and most effective one would be for Oracle to commit to sell
> MySQL to a suitable third party).
>
>  
>
> In light of this aggressive campaigning by Oracle, Monty made the
> following call on the open source community a few hours ago:
> http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.html
>
>  
>
>
> Aidan
>
>

I see no problem with this latest development. Even if Oracle pulled all
the funding, all the people currently using MySQL will be able to do so
for many years. So many people are using MySQL that its very likely to
get forked.

In fact, the best possible scenario is that MySQL gets forked in to a
community project; by the community for the community. It should never
have been owned by a company in the first place.

That said, I don't see any reason for Oracle to shut down MySQL. MySQL
and Oracle are not in competition. MySQL can really only be considered a
semi-relational dumb datastore. It's good for little applications.

Oracle on the other hand is a real database designed for real
transaction processing.

This difference means there is a reason to fund both products. It's
horses for courses. Some people need a air-tight, high availablity, high
throughput database. Others need a fast semi-relational DB that doesn't
have the bells and whistles.

The two markets are complimentary. Ford makes supercars and it makes the
KA. It is a sensible business strategy to do. Similiarly, it is sensible
to fund both MySQL and Oracle.

Cheers,

Simon.






-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/liverpool/attachments/20091213/84b54f4a/attachment.htm