Interesting news this morning, just as the 2009 MySQL Conference is starting. As is being reported all over the place, Oracle has agreed to buy Sun at $9.50 per share, giving them to a ton of great technology (Solaris, ZFS, MySQL, DTrace, etc.).
One one of the biggest threats to Oracle's core database business (at the low end, at least) for a while now has been MySQL. And now they're poised to own MySQL after Sun bought it not long ago. (It seems like yesterday that Oracle bought Innobase.)
As I noted a while back, the MySQL landscape is changing.
This news is sure to make the conference more... interesting.
Oracle, please get the InnoDB team together with the MySQL team and see about GPLing ZFS.
Posted by jzawodn at April 20, 2009 06:57 AM
Ok, so does this mean MySQL is going to get buried? Or, no more GPL and we'll have to pay STUPID amounts of cash for a worthless version that forces us into Oracle pseudo SQL? Guess I'll look into another SQL instead. Maybe PostgreSQL or Ingres.
IBM was a much better match. Oracle will swallow MySQL and who knows what will happen. H/W-wise? who knows. Java? fuck, IBM was better for the community as they would have opened totally. This will give Oracle more power/monopoly while less benefit to community of developers...
The shareholders have won, the community has lost. I hope I'm wrong...
ceo
The uncertainty is very unsettling, but I can't see Oracle harming the MySQL userbase. Monetizing it, maybe.
Keep us posted from the conference please, Jeremy.
Right now everyone thinks that IBM is the better partner, because they are currently open source friendly.
But DB2 competes with MySQL; and will IBM continue to support Solaris against Linux or it's own OS'es.
I appreciate companies contributing to open source but ultimately there is an incredible risk to relying on them for software.
Sure, MySQL and Solaris can fork from where ever they are now and we can hope that someone will pick up the project but ultimately we need a model that supports open source financially.
