Just woke up this morning to news that Oracle is buying Sun. After cursing myself for not having bought some JAVA last week when it was in the 6 range (pre-market now at 9.10), I started thinking about what this might mean for MySQL.
About a year ago, Sun purchased MySQL. Although a lot of hooha was made about what might happen to MySQL at that time, Sun made it pretty clear that they wouldn’t be changing too much of the company they were purchasing. They’d wanted to have a good story on the low-end of computing (from what I remember) and the LAMP stack (where M was for MySQL) dominated much of the low-end of web development. While it was never on the same level as Ebay buying Skype, I think a lot of people were confused by how Sun would be able to get back the billion dollars they expended on the MySQL deal.
Fast forward a year. Some of the key MySQL core team have left, forking the MySQL product in the process (drizzle). Is the MySQL branch of Sun very attractive? I imagine Oracle was looking more at the hardware and consulting side of the Sun acquisition, not the database side, but this won’t site well with many in the MySQL world.
The MySQL community has always been a bit suspicious of Oracle. Many were quite alarmed when Oracle purchased InnoDB, the company that made the innodb MySQL table engine, and that was something that spurred on work on other transaction engines in the MySQL world. Nothing has yet come to be adopted as widely as innodb yet, and Oracle’s control of InnoDB has continued to be a bit of concern for some in the community.
Is Oracle getting much on the database front when they purchase Sun? There’s probably not enough of a marketshare between the two to claim that there’s some sort of monopoly anti-trust considerations to take in to account (MSSQL, DB2 and PostgreSQL – what is their combined marketshare?)
Is there a danger that “MySQL” as a product will be a name brand, but that many people will just start using community forks? I can see that “MySQL” as a database engine might end up being a generic term, somewhat like “Linux”, in that there are many distros out there serving different needs. Not sure if the MySQL licensing would ever allow for that degree of diversity, but maybe we’ll see something like this in reaction to the Oracle purchase.
Side question – what will this do to Java and OpenOffice? Hopefully Oracle will leave these (and MySQL) intact, and just focus on integrating these technologies in to their sales and consulting process, but leave the tech direction alone.
I’m hoping it will mean people will stop launching new projects with MySQL, and start paying attention to better solutions like PostgreSQL.