In The EU and MySQL, Tim Bray treads lightly on the topic of Oracle's pending ownership of MySQL if the Sun acquisition goes through. I left a comment on his post, but he's likely to be heavily moderating what appears there since he works for Sun.
So here's what I posted on his blog.
I haven't yet seen anyone explain what motivation Oracle has for pouring resources into MySQL, especially if it eats away at their DBMS business on the low end.
I've been puzzling over this since their acquisition of Innobase Oy (the makers of InnoDB) years back. Is Oracle serious about seeing MySQL grow and succeed, or was that just a way to get a strangle-hold on a critical piece of MySQL?
I've never had the chance to ask Ken Jacobs that. Actually, I have but it would have been kind of rude. And even if I did, I'm not sure I could trust the answer.
I doubt this comment will get published, but as a MySQL long time user, supporter, advocate, and author I'm really glad to see things like PBXT, MariaDB, and Percona's XtraDB out there.
Really, we need that kind of diversity in Open Source. A MySQL/InnoDB "monopoly" wouldn't have been healthy in the long run.
A reporter contacted me today to ask, among other things, if I think Oracle was/is threatened by MySQL. Oracle claims that they serve two different markets, etc. He wasn't so sure.
Sadly, there's some background information that I should not publish here, but suffice it to say that Oracle was and probably still is threatened by MySQL. Their sales/marketing tactics made this quite clear long ago. But those deals were rarely public--for good reason.
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