Tuesday, November 10, 2009

EU Queries MySQL in Sun-Oracle Merger

The European Union's statement of objections expresses concerns that businesses might have fewer choices and see higher prices if Oracle (already the world's largest proprietary database vendor) ends up with MySQL by default.

In case you're getting a bit confused by all these fish eating each other, the Wikipedia entry for MySQL reminds us:
The project has made its source code available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements. MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems. As of 2009 Oracle Corporation began the process of acquiring Sun Microsystems; Oracle holds the copyright to most of the MySQL codebase.
Oracle Corp. has stated that the commission's objection "reveals a profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics," but some FOSS developers have a different take on that.

1 comment:

Stefan Parvu said...

My 2c about this matter:

Its kind of funny how EU is playing this game between Sun,Oracle and
MySQL community. They (EU) said its all about MySQL to be set free and
ensure its community and ecosystem wont die... Huh.
I think this is kind of blah-blah around...

If MySQL really wanted to stay on community and be 100% independent of
any vendor they (MySQL AB) should have consider to *keep* the company private. Simple and to the point. MySQL was all making money as any other public
companies. That's the game...

More Oracle.com cannot kill its ecosystem. That's a nonsense. And as well there are more choices out there outside the MySQL ecosystem, like PostgreSQL community. So how comes this MySQL is so important over night !?

There are other open source DB solutions and from my point of view this
is way too much noise about MySQL project. PostgreSQL is far more
mature project and *independent*.

PS: I tried two times to publish under
Monty says my comment but got user unknown back in my email:

550 5.1.1 monty at mysql.com... User unknown