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Mickos Urges EU To Approve Oracle's MySQL Takeover
mjasay writes "Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has written to EU Commissioner of Competition Neelie Kroes to urge speedy approval of Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun, including the open-source MySQL database. The EU has been worried that Oracle's acquisition of Sun could end up hurting competition by dampening or killing MySQL's momentum. But in his letter, Mickos separates MySQL-the-community from MySQL-the-company, arguing that Oracle's takeover cannot hurt the MySQL community: 'Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close, mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But, most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.' In a follow-up interview with CNET, Mickos indicated that he has no financial interest in the matter, but instead argues he 'couldn't live with the fact that [he's] not taking action,' and is 'motivated now by trying to help the employees still at MySQL and Sun, and by an urge to bring rational discussion to the matter.'"
I'm happy he is taking action.
Too often, technically-knowledgeable people don't recognize or accept the need for them to be social leaders.
if they mess MySql up(even more that is), people can just move to Postgre, Firebird, Couchdb, Drizzle, etc.. There's anything but a shortage of open-source databases.
It's not that easy to kill an open source project.
I use MySQL exclusively and it would nice if Oracle were given a shot at supporting MySQL. Even if they do try and kill it to gain leverage for their own database, there's always MariaDB (a MySQL fork by Monty Widenius, the original creator of MySQL).
Even the threat of Oracle owning MySQL is motivating commercial users to look more closely at the BSD-licensed PostgreSQL. If the sale goes forward, it may the biggest boost yet to the PostgreSQL community.
Oracle owns Berkeley DB, from when they bought Sleepy Cat Software. Has anyone heard of _any_ useful progress in Berkeley DB, which used to rule Linux for lightweight, small databases? I thought not: they supported it a little bit, and it's been profoundly ignored for years now, by both its owners and the open source community at large.
I'm afraid that MySQL is fated for the same end: Oracle has little incentive to support it properly or to expand its role when it competes directly with their core products. It can be forked, but how much will be left of the core development team that really understood its features and trade-offs after 3 years working at Oracle?
I don't see why the EU is worried in the first place. First of all MySQL could never compete with Oracle's DB. They will never compete and never have. Completely different use-cases. Apart from that, I'm still using PostgreSQL and if i had an app specifically designed for MySQL, I'd go with Drizzle(fork).
Oracle can effectively kill MySQL. Although anyone can fork MySQL and support it in theory, the reality is not this simple.
To continue to be a force in the marketplace (albeit at the low end), the maintainers will need real funding to drive and manage the development. The primary problem is that essentially the only business models that actually works for open source companies is the hybrid licensing model and this option would almost certainly be unavailable to them.
The support business model frankly isn't a great way to make money and have enough margins to pay for expensive and continued development efforts. No doubt someone could make money creating patches and offering support, but I do not believe that would cover continued improvement.
A company would also need to emerge as the dominant MySQL offering and convince would-be users that they are viable.
Perhaps IBM or some other large company would subsidize development, but I would not want to count on it.
If Oracle decides to bury MySQL, I would bet that it disappears from the marketplace after a few years for all intents and purposes. Sure, you could still find a handful of hackers playing with it, making interesting hacks, etc... but most users will simply move on to greener pastures.
That being said, I do not believe this is an antitrust issue and the EU should STFU. :-)
I'm seeing more and more ISPs offer PostreSQL in addition to MySQL. They don't really support it like they do MySQL, but it is being offered more.
there are lots of kinds of open source project. some thrive on the mind share of individuals. on the other end of the spectrum are those that are backed 100% by employees that are paid to be involved in (to run) the community. both are perfectly valid and valuable.
sun-mysql is the latter. anything that affects the sun-mysql employees (greatly) affects the community. mysql couldn't exist without the involvement of those people, people that will be under the thumb of oracle.
also, you have to look at motivation. the mysql CEO is most certainly looking at a fat bonus as soon as the deal goes through. there's a pool in the bakyward of his mansion that needs to be funded.
~1 year ago, sun microsystems acquires mysql, the most popular and most used database for small to medium size deployments. mysql: a company with $100m in revenue, with a purchase price of $2b dollars. at the time, sun had it fingers in many other databases, including heavy involvement with postgres and derby, and others. by all accounts sun overpaid. the response to this is that mysql was acquired for it's open source value, and for it's community.
this year, oracle, the #1 database vendor, acquires sun microsystems, thereby acquiring mysql.
some conspiracy theorists might suggest that the only reason sun acquired mysql was to make itself more attractive as a takeover target. others might go as far to suggest that it was all a plot from day one between sun and oracle to squash mysql without drawing direct attention. would anyone have batted an eye if oracle had acquired mysql directly? maybe not, but it would surely be getting more attention then it is now.
Once upon a time, MySQL supported the use of Berkeley DB as one of its back end storage engines. Then Oracle acquired Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB (which was, and still is, open source). MySQL didn't like the idea of Oracle controlling their back end, so they phased out its support.
Now it doesn't matter anymore. Oracle is going to own MySQL and Berkeley DB. In my opinion, Berkeley DB is the finest storage engine on the planet. Either with a relational/schema layer on top of it (like MySQL), or all by itself (in which case it's simple key/value pairs), it is insanely reliable and its performance is excellent. I can't say enough good things about it. So how about it, Oracle? Can we get these two great pieces of software together again?
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Having used MySQL in an enterprise computing environment, I reckon even Oracle's worst enemies would also urge the EU To Approve Oracle's MySQL Takeover. ;-)
Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP.
Postgres is BSD licensed. Even if the parent company is the victim of a hostile takeover, that means you can fork the existing codebase, and keep developing and using it. It also means that it doesn't have the viral aspect of the GPL, either; so it's more business friendly as well.
"... people who don't want the Oracle/Sun merger to happen."
Who are they, and why?