[geeks] And the other shoe drops - Oracle to buy Sun

[Mark Benson]

On 20 Apr 2009, at 22:08, Bill Bradford wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 03:48:11PM -0400, Joshua Boyd wrote:
>> For MySQL users, I think there are plenty of forks they could move  
>> to.
>> That said, I doubt that Oracle will kill MySQL.  They probably want  
>> the
>> support fees that can get from supporting large internet services  
>> that
>> will never, ever, ever consider something like Oracle.
>
> I think MySQL will become their low-end offering, with paid support
> available of course!

Yes, but will it still be free and open-source? If it remains FOSS and  
Oracle invest some of their much-founded database knowledge to make it  
even better then all power to their elbow. if they close it up and  
stick a price label on in then millions of installations (I think 11  
million at the latest estimate) are gonna be screwed practically over  
night.

I really have no experience of Oracle as a company and they've always  
been a bit of a looming spectre. They always seemed to me to be one of  
those companies that wanted control over everything, and in my book  
that's bad, and good, but only of you do it well. As this list has  
demonstrated before people have deeply polarized views of Oracle  
products. I've always shunned them as boing 'the man' in database  
circles, as opposed to my meddling in the small millpond of MySQL.

It's not a personal thing that worries me Re: this merger, it's  
aprofessional one. I've spent years building systems that all run off  
MySQL, if it goes to the wall it'll mean porting to PostGres and  
learning the whole deal over again. I won't be the only one either.  
Massive swaiths of the Internet are built on nothing more than Apache,  
PHP and MySQL. Surely there's got to be some inertia in that which  
will lead Oracle to maintain it's community status? Well I guess it  
just depends how nice they are feeling, and theor CEO never struck me  
as a very 'nice' person.


-- 
Mark Benson

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