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Oracle Acquires Innobase

Posted by jamie on from the heavy-user dept.

A short time ago, Oracle announced its acquisition of Innobase, the Finnish company that makes the GPL'd InnoDB table storage engine. Among MySQL users, the separately-written InnoDB is almost as popular as the native MyISAM engine, and is considered to be more advanced for most purposes. Slashdot has, except for search, run entirely on InnoDB for the past year or two so we're as concerned about this as anybody. Brian Aker, former Slashdot coder and current Director of Architecture for MySQL AB, comments: "InnoDB is GPL, so once again the beauty of the open source market is at play: there is no lock in, and we can continue to develop Innodb as we see fit. The code is out there and we plan on continuing to support it. The largest database vendor in the world just confirmed that the market for open source databases exists."

3 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Confirmation? by jlowery · · Score: 4, Interesting
    "The code is out there and we plan on continuing to support it. The largest database vendor in the world just confirmed that the market for open source databases exists."

    I would think that it was the users of InnoDB that confirmed that the market for open source databases exist.

    Also, what about IBM and their open-sourcing of Cloudscape? Don't they count?

    --
    If you post it, they will read.
  2. Interesting questions come up by MemoryDragon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The MySQL business model works following way. They enforce the GPL and if you want to get out of the GPL you have to pay, just like qt, but MySQL has a problem there. Qt has its own codebase, MySQL does not, they rely on Berkley DB and on InnoDB, obviously there must be some relicensing contract between them so that people can relicense the InnoDB code non GPL, so what if Oracle refuses this relicensing in the future. MySQL might have a problem bigger than it seems on their hand. BDB is not the best repo (ask the SVN guys) and InnoDB is now in the hands of Oracle. Not that I would be sad to see MySQL going the way of the dodo, but this issue is bigger than it seems.

  3. Re:/. concerned? by jamie · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Because continuing InnoDB development is critical to upcoming versions of MySQL, and development of a database engine requires more than simply GPL'd code. In the past, Heikki Tuuri's company Innobase has been eager to develop InnoDB specifically for MySQL's needs, because MySQL was in a sense the only "platform" it ran on. But that's not likely to be true in the near future, or at the very least, not necessarily true.

    I do know there are at least several developers at MySQL AB who are intimately familiar with the InnoDB code, but I don't know if there are enough to fork the code and continue its development in the same vein as before. Frankly I will be surprised if this doesn't slow down 5.x development at least a little, while MySQL AB shuffles people around to get them up to speed.