Safe as Milk

Oracle buys MySQL shocker (and they get the rest of Sun too)

April 20, 2009 2:08 pm Dave Neary freesoftware

In an effort to further perturb the free software market which has been threatening its middleware, application server and database markets recently, the management in Oracle has come up with the masterly stroke of buying Sun Microsystems, and with it a chief competitor, MySQL.

Oracle had already announced their intention to undermine MySQL a few years ago when they bought InnoDB, the ACID database engine used by MySQL, just 18 months before their licensing agreement with the Swedes was due to expire. If you don’t understand why a licensing agreement was needed, you need to think about what licence MySQL was distributing InnoDB under when selling commercial MySQL licences.

My thought at the time was that Oracle could just refuse to renew the licensing arrangement, leaving MySQL without a revenue stream. The problem became moot when Sun bought MySQL, and less critical when MySQL announced they were working on an alternative ACID engine.

Oracle have been trying to undermine free software vendors for a while now, including its launch of Unbreakable Linux to compete directly with Red Hat. Red Hat had previously purchased JBoss, a product competing directly with WebLogic, Oracle’s application server product.

I figure that Oracle will do what some people were suggesting Sun should have done: wrap up Sun into three different entities: storage, servers and software. They have an interest in keeping the storage unit around – there’s considerable synergy possible there for a database company.

Within the software business unit, they will probably drop OpenOffice.org pretty quickly, and I can’t see them maintaining support for OpenSolaris or GNOME. They will keep selling and supporting Solaris as a cash cow for years to come, in the same way IBM did with the Informix database server some years ago, and Java will be a valuable asset to them.

I don’t think Oracle has a strategic interest in becoming a hardware vendor, however, and I can’t imagine a very big percentage of their client base is using SPARC systems these days, so I don’t see them keeping the server business around for long.

Interesting days ahead in the free software world! From the point of view of MySQL, it will be interesting to see if some ex-MySQL employees take the old GPL code and keep the project going under a different company & different name, or if Drizzle (or one of the other forks) gets critical mass as a community-run project to take over a sizeable chunk of the install base. For Oracle, it will be interesting to see if they start trying to move existing MySQL customers over to Oracle, or if they maintain both products, or if they EOL all support on MySQL altogether and force people into a choice. I imagine that the most likely scenario is that they will maintain support staff, cut development staff, and let the product die a slow and painful death.