I am not impressed.

As a former employee of a large Internet company (the largest at the time, in fact) that used both Oracle and MySQL, I'm utterly puzzled by this. I can't think of why we should trust Oracle to do right by the users of MySQL--especially the non-paying users.

You see, for years Oracle worked agressively behind the scenes to discredit MySQL and tried hard to understand how their customers could ever consider using such a "toy" instead of their flagship product. In fact, it was so important to Oracle that they offered some very substantial discounts to customers who were using MySQL and Oracle. In some cases the discounts were so impressive that their motivation was clear: cut off the opportunity for MySQL to grow and spread in such organizations. (Remember what happened to Netscape when Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer for free?)

The funny thing is that it really didn't work. MySQL was already a fast moving train with lots of momentum. And it was still accelerating.

It was clear that Oracle saw MySQL as a threat to their business. When they eventually bought Innobase (the company that makes the InnoDB storage engine), many of us got more than a bit nervious. That put Oracle in a position of having a choke hold on the one componenet that was critical to MySQL's future success. They could have just shut down development entirely. But that may have made their motives a bit too clear.

Since then they've continued to develop InnoDB. However, the pace hasn't exactly been agressive and their openness around that has left me (and others) wondering what their longer term plans really are. The few tidbits we get seem to be overly vague. Could they have been throttling development of InnoDB? Or not providing the same resources that MySQL (and now Sun) would have? It's hard to say.

But here's the thing that continues to bug me...

Back a few years ago when Oracle dismissing MySQL in public while working hard against it in private, I realized that they were simply trying everything they could to protect their crowned jewels: public denials and classic FUD paired with hush-hugh backroom deals.

Nobody has managed to explain, in even a mildly convincing way, what has changed since then. Why should we suddenly trust Oracle? Their crowned jewels are still threatened by MySQL.

Convince me.

See Also: Monty's appeal is selfless!

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It's so random that it's funny.

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