MySQL Mess To Get Worse in 2010
Michael Widenius certainly has his concerns about the Oracle acquisition of Sun. Michael is the original developer of MySQL and worked on the project for more than 27 years. It is worth reading his posts about the importance of the GPL in MySQL licensing and even goes on to tie the fate of MySQL to the free nature of the Internet. What I find facinating is that his argument is that the open source project requires a strong corporate master invested in making it competitive with closed source databases.For all the arguments and worry about MySQL, I believe that the Sun acquisition was more motivated by the fate of Java than MySQL. It is understandable why Sun was seeking to sell itself. Although much of the success of today’s internet is a result of resting on the highly stable Solaris OS and the development of Java enabled an entirely new (and not always rock solid) way to deploy server side and handheld applications, new technologies have come along to kick out their revenue potential. Oracle has heavily invested in Java as a development environment, and the threat over the last two years of a possible acquisition by rival IBM of Sun made the acquisition of Sun an important step for Oracle. Oracle really does not need MySQL, but they needed Java. Solaris is also a nice alternative to Linux, too.
I think Michael is going to have a lot of heartache in 2010. MySQL AB had an extremely aggressive sales force and rather difficult to understand licensing that, in combination, generated revenues for MySQL AB from confused executives at development companies and end user companies who became enamored with MySQL because it was free – but later found it wasn’t free for their commerical endeavors. Oracle certainly has an aggressive sales force, but the mindset is different. The sort of bait and switch mentality for licensing isn’t a part of the Oracle way of doing things – and I can see some of Michael’s fears coming true. Prices will very likely go up, up, up. The software license will probably not change for a while – at least until the worries of government probes are behind them.
