[Charlug] Oracle buys Sun

[Dennis Clark]

The worst that Oracle can do to MySQL at this point is to slow down the
development of new features and enhancements. MySQL is too popular and too
stable for Oracle to be able to kill outright.

If Oracle really wanted to eliminate MySQL as a competitor to their flagship
DB they would be better off following the "embrace and extend" approach:
keep supporting it, keep adding new features to it, but slowly migrate the
licensing from open-source to no-cost closed-source. If they manage to hook
enough customers on their new features, they could then switch from no-cost
to for-fee licencing: customers would then be faced with sticking with an
unsupported product, facing a painful product switch, or paying up their
licensing fees.

The open source community knows that game though, and the first signs of
Oracle changing their licensing will most likely inspire some open source
developers to fork the MySQL project. This would case a temporary disruption
as the community reorganizes (for example, you may have competing forks
early on until they merge or the weaker forks die off) but with a product as
strong as MySQL I predict it would not take very long to recover. Oracle may
keep the naming rights to MySQL so expect a renaming of the open-source
project under this scenario: "OurSQL", anyone?

-- Dennis

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 7:29 AM, Bob Evans <bobevans19 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Wonder if this buyout will squash MySQL...
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Leam Hall <leam at reuel.net> wrote:
>
>> Slashdot says so, but Oracle seems slashdot'd...
>>
>> Leam
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