Oracle bought Sun, I’m very sad for MySQL. Oracle won’t kill MySQL, but also won’t allow it to grow to its full potential. Anyone who thinks MySQL is just a toy needs to do more homework. MySQL powers Google, EBay, Slashdot, Drools Business Rule Management System, just to name a few. I don’t want to see this happen: Oracle still gives away MySQL for free but limits its features and performance, remove clustering from MySQL. If the users want more, then Oracle would give an “upgrade” offer of their closed source Oracle DBMS, and the users must pay bloody much then. I’m afraid this will happen.
Oracle’s business is basically around closed source products, MySQL ( up to version 5.0 ) is a rare gem from the Open Source community. Their genes are so different, Oracle is not the right sitter for MySQL, IMHO. If any at all, it should be Red Hat. Red Hat has almost everything in the “enterprise software” line, they just don’t have a database product. MySQL would close this gap for Red Hat. And, being aware of MySQL’s importance, Red Hat, if the stakeholders are sensible enough, would surely grant a lot of resource to MySQL and let it grow to its best. Sigh, but I’m afraid Red Hat won’t get MySQL, even if once they wanted to.
Good news is that the founder of MySQL Monty and some other core developers of the original MySQL is now working on a free MySQL branch called MariaDB. This project is well funded, and more important than the monetary fund, the chief developers have great passion for creating a great open source RDBMS. Competing against the Oracle RDBMS is not the main point, IMHO. What really counts here is the liberty, transparency to client developers, and freedom. These are priceless to me.
Long live liberty and freedom!
Well, hard to tell what’s gonna happen, but I don’t think it is too bad.
Besides, we still have PostgreSQL, and MySQL isn’t any better than PostgreSQL (arguably it is the other way around), just more popular.
Cheers