From reading here, this gives me a chill! I love MySQL, and I’m scaring for it! I hope the creator of MySQL and everyone else who loves MySQL and me are wrong about Oracle’s future plan for MySQL. Here is the brief, MySQL is an open source software created by Michael Widenius, later sold to Sun, and now is about being bought up by Oracle. The issue here is that Oracle has its own famous commercial database known as Oracle, but Sun did not have a similar flagship product when it bought MySQL. Plus, when Sun bought MySQL, Sun kept its promise in keeping MySQL free and open source. It turns out that MySQL is a thorn for Oracle, because many big businesses nowadays are using MySQL instead of Oracle, even though Oracle has couple more features than MySQL, but the price tag of free is just too good to pass on, and it’s not like MySQL is a bad product — in fact MySQL is one excellent database product.
The creator of MySQL thinks that Oracle may let MySQL dies slowly, or turn MySQL into a close source product with a possibility of having a huge price sticker. This will hurt millions small businesses that are depending on MySQL. Small businesses do not have the cash to invest in expensive database licenses. Plus, home grown or out of the garage web services will have to make use of other open source databases, but MySQL is the best in all of those (in my opinion). This is why I’m also against Oracle to take over MySQL, because in my personal point of view on this matter, Oracle already has a famous Oracle database product, Oracle may not want another similar sub-product that it picks up from the purchase of Sun to compete its commercial product. Forking GPL code (open source code) of MySQL to new name is doable, but who guarantees that when forking, the product will be the same or may survive and thrive? If you care about MySQL, please read the original blog post of the MySQL’s creator on this matter here.
Vinh Nguyen
