All Things Patrick - Working Hard to be Lazy!

If you've not seen the news yet, Oracle is buying Sun for 10 cents a share more than IBM's final offer (Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems). And if you're really lagging in tech news, MySQL was purchased by Sun a while ago.

Many people were worried about Sun's purchase of MySQL and what that would mean. MySQL is an open source database and is in use all over the internet. I was somewhat worried about where they might decide to push the commercial product as that somewhat leads the open source project.

I'm thinking Oracle is primarily purchasing Sun for their hardware, not for MySQL - MySQL is just a bonus. However, as someone else pointed out, Oracle hasn't really been making anything new. Oracle has been buying out companies that make great 3rd party apps for Oracle, repackaging it with the Oracle brand, and selling as is - bugs and all.

<MinceR> maybe Oracle will beat some sense into Sun management

<MinceR> and i think it's certainly better than IBM, Novell or m$ buying them

<Dot> that's what i'm hoping too, oracle makes very professional programs... they are really worth

<Dot> even the free version of oracle 9.11g is impressive

<MinceR> afaik oracle makes crap

<Dot> why?

<MinceR> but then sun will be in good company

<MinceR> afaict all they were doing lately was buying third-parties developing new management tools for oracle and just bundling the new stuff

<MinceR> without integrating them in any way

<MinceR> so oracle is a mess

<Dot> apart MySQL and PostgreSQL, i don't see any other good db system apart from oracle

There's 3 ways I can see this going. The worst still doesn't make MySQL go away simply because it's open source and it's license makes it impossible for it not to be branched and continued by the FOSS community.

1. Oracle takes Oracle off the market (at some point, probably not immediately), fully embraces MySQL, buys up companies making management software and resells that for MySQL - just like they've been doing with Oracle. I highly doubt this will happen, but it is possible.
2. Oracle accepts MySQL as it's new red-headed step child and only offers it as a last resort. As it now also owns the commercial license for MySQL it will probably also cannibalize any useful parts of MySQL, that it legally can without having to worry about legal ramifications from the license, for use in Oracle.
3. Oracle continues to see MySQL as a competitor and does everything it can to squash it's (Oracle's) new product line. Oracle will refuse to give up the MySQL commercial license, refuse official support for clients, try to move existing commercial clients to Oracle, and generally be as much of a nuisance as possible to try to chase people away from using MySQL. While Oracle can't kill MySQL outright, Oracle will do as much as possible to prevent anybody else from pushing MySQL forward.

Considering the current economy, Sun's current position, and Oracle's current position I think if Oracle decides to squash MySQL will be a good indicator as to when Oracle is going under.

While I'm not anti-Oracle (I am anti-Microsoft software and willing to admit it) I am somewhat worried about Oracle acquiring MySQL. Competition between database companies has been greatly beneficial to where databases are today and will be in the next couple of years. With 1 company owning 2 (not the only 2) of the most popular databases I'm worried that the innovation will slow.