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

[Joshua Boyd]

On Apr 21, 2009, at 3:02 AM, Mark Benson wrote:

> 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.

If MySQL 7 tries to go closed source, then there are plenty of forks  
to choose from, such as Drizzle or Percona.  That said, Berkeley DB  
is still open source.