Oracle Responds To MySQL Purchase Concerns

Luke has no name writes "Yesterday we discussed MySQL founder Monty Widenius's objections to the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle. Today, Oracle released a statement to address some of these issues. Among their commitments, Oracle says they intend to continue releasing MySQL under the GPL, allow vendors to produce 'any-license' third-party engines, maintain the Reference Manual, invest millions into the product, and create a 'customer advisory board.' The pledges are still not enough for some, however."

Comments

Makes sense

[Midnight Thunder]

If you think about it makes sense for Oracle to continue developing MySQL, since this is like Nissan and Infiniti where the customer is provided with a high-end product and a low-end product. Oracle gets to offer service for both, recognising that not everyone wants to have to deal with the Oracle database product, either due to cost or needs. At the same time for customers growing past what MySQL is good at, Oracle can then offer them an upgrade path to their premium product.

Re:Makes sense

[herring0]

Along the same line as the high-end/low-end thing Oracle does have a 'low-end' Oracle database (Oracle XE) but it's never really gotten any kind of following or use that I have seen. So I could definitely understand their interest in providing an entry-level system with their name attached.

I've not understood the complaints about sharing the market space. Anyone running full-blown Oracle database systems will be well and truly beyond MySQL. Aside from that, try and get some PHB to understand that MySQL is in any way comparable to Oracle.

On the plus side- if Oracle can actually provide an easy to use path to migrate from MySQL to Oracle or to provide some kind of abstraction layer that would let you use MySQL-backed applications with Oracle I would cheer them to no end.

And as for the founder's (and the founder's buddy referenced in the article) concerns about the future of the product then he shouldn't have sold the damn thing. So sorry, you sold your rights to it. Fork it and start over if you really care that much.

Re:Makes sense

[postbigbang]

You've heard of LAMP: Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl-php-etc.
Now there's Linux/Apache/Oracle/Perl-php-etc.

Nah, I don't think so. This analogy of Oracle for The Big Stuff and MySQL for The Little Stuff is for the birds. MySQL launched a lot of great apps and platforms that Oracle couldn't touch because of their price and perception of being Big Stuff. There's every reason to believe that they'll continue to let MySQL evolve, and perhaps use that evolution to improve their own stuff-- and their ability to get developers to gravitate towards Oracle products rather than MySQL.

Re:Makes sense

[Rob Y.]

If Oracle wanted to get really tricky, they'd re-license MySQL under GPL3 (or whatever version beyond that that prohibits ASP-based proprietary applications). Stallman would probably be thrilled, but your average commercial LAMP site, not so much. There are many ways for Oracle to turn ownership of MySQL to their advantage without either shutting it down or making it 'non-free'.

That's probably good for the MySQL developers Oracle is likely to employ. For the rest of us, there's still PostgreSQL...

Re:Makes sense

[Znork]

The only reason they have to buy MySQL is that it is part and parcel of the Sun purchase.

Yes, that was the appearance at the start. By now it seems that if MySQL was just something tagging along for the ride with the Sun purchase, Oracle would have offered to spin it off as soon as the EC sounded like it was going to do anything but a cursory rubber stamping of the deal. With the way Ellison is behaving it's looking more like the rest of Sun is the disposable tag along and that MySQL was the meat of the deal all along. And if MySQL actually was the main target of the acquisition, then I can't see that sitting well with the future development of MySQL in directions that would compete with Oracles more central products.

Monty Widenius wants to use MySQL code without having to distribute his modifications

Well, it's business, the eternal struggle of evil versus evil, and sometimes it's hard to say which side is evil and which side is evil. And considering nobody even cares about war crimes or the convention against torture any more, things being illegal under a treaty only seems to apply to low-mid income citizens, not to corporations or governments.

Still, your point is valid, and Widenius desires are not something that the EC should care about. So while I think the EC should require that Oracle divest MySQL for the acquisition to be approved, I see no reason why any other public or private owner of MySQL should be affected in such a way unless they had other specific competitive issues.

Fork?

[ickleberry]

Would it not be a good idea to fork MySQL at this point? rather than relying on Oracle who pledge (which is not legally binding) to continue supporting MySQL and giving it away for free. Even though there is no compelling reason for them to unless they plan to assimilate it into their outrageously priced commercial database packages

Big companies like Oracle are just not to be trusted, any embracing they do must be seen as simply the first step to extending and extinguishing. It would be completely naive to think otherwise

Re:Fork?

[Sir_Lewk]

How about waiting to see what happens, then forking if needed? There really is no reason to fork ahead of time, all it will accomplish is fragmenting the userbase and cause tension in the community.

Honestly I'm getting tired of all of this "OMG Oracle bought MySQL, the sky is falling!!!" nonsense. If the sky does start to fall, then fork. Otherwise just stop, it's getting annoying.

Re:Why bother with MySQL?

[Yvan256]

Because 99.99% of the web hosting companies offer LAMP setups?

Re:Why Not Reserve Judgment?

[Bruce Perens]

Yes. Having seen Eben Moglen speak in favor of Oracle, if someone thinks the GPL partisans are the problem they aren't reading more than the headlines.

Re:Why bother with MySQL?

[Yvan256]

In this case I think it's more about laziness than vendor lockin. ;)

Re:Monty and Florian want MySQL to be BSD licensed

[mcoon]

Well, you could always switch to PostgreSQL. Once the switch is made, you never have to look back.

Re:Under the GPL, whats the problem?

[Xtifr]

If MySQL was not under the GPL at the time shame on Monty,

It was, but the copyright holder is free to offer the code under other licenses. Monty's complaint is now that he sold the copyrights, he can no longer offer the code under other license terms. It was a fairly lucrative business for him, but he sold that business for a lot of money, and now he wants to have it given back to him for free. (Free as in beer, not speech.)

Your arguments apply just fine to the rest of us. Oracle owning the GPL'd MySQL is no threat to anyone except Monty's greed.

Re:Monty and Florian want MySQL to be BSD licensed

[rahvin112]

If Monty wants it back I'm sure the 1Billion he got paid can be used to pay to redevelop the code.

Oracle has no incentive to kill the MySQL ecosystem, it's going to be their low end competitor against MS and SAP products. It has more value to them as a working system than a dead one. If that had been their intention to kill MySQL they could have done immense damage when they acquired INNODB, at least temporarily. Yet they continued to develop and improve INNODB just like they will with MySQL.

Oracle's bread and butter is support contracts, not license revenue. MySQL buys them another market to sell support into. Just speculating but they also will have the ability to make it possible for MySQL to use Oracle for it's engine, bringing some heavy advantages to high availability LAMP stacks where customers are already using Oracle on the backend and replicating into mysql for the LAMP application. Monty's big fear is he's built a company (MariaDB AB) doing the same thing with the MySQL code as he had with MySQL AB and he's worried that Oracle will shut him out or kill the ability of commercial forks and force everything GPL. As they have used the GPL as a marketing threat (they told all their customers using the GPL branch would force them to GPL their databases) and now he's scared he will have to operate in the GPL ecosystem knowing he has nothing to offer by reselling the same code anyone else can.

Monty is a liar, Groklaw caught him in the lie and he shouldn't be trusted. Let him use all that money he got paid to redevelop a closed source DB if he wants to have a proprietary product. He's abusing the EU approval process for personal gain.