The MySQL petition

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

It is a sad situation, but one that happens every once in a while, and
particularly when a profit-making company heads up a FOSS project.

In 2008 Sun bought MySQL for 1 Billion dollars, 800 million in cash and
200 million in options.  Someone got a lot of money, and quite a few
people probably continued to pull a good salary working for Sun, so
Sun's stockholders made a real investment in MySQL, even though it was a
GPLed product and could have been forked at any time.

And we should not overlook the effort of "forking the code".  Yes, the
code itself is GPLed (and MySQL did a good job of keeping the GPLed
version fairly cheek-to-cheek with the features of the "commercial"
version), but there is a lot of IP in the behind-the-scenes code and set
up of testing tools, building tools, etc. that would have to be
duplicated.

And as Ben pointed out, the name, brand, etc. has a lot of worth.  If
these were not true, then Sun would not have spent 1 Billion dollars to
buy MySQL.

Now Sun has been sold to Oracle.  The argument is that Oracle might kill
off MySQL or simply let it languish.  Unfortunately for the MySQL folks
Oracle does not have a history of doing this.  In 1994 they bought Rdb
from Digital, moved the engineering people to another building close by
Digital's Spitbrook Rd facility, and as late as 2008 was still updating
and improving Rdb.  Yes, they dropped support for Rdb on Tru64 Unix, but
that is mostly because Tru64 disappeared.  AFAIK Oracle is still
supporting it on OpenVMS.

Berkeley DB was an embedded Open Source project maintained by a company
called Sleepycat Software and was bought by Oracle.  They still maintain
it as FOSS and sell support.

Granted, Oracle markets and pushes its own database engine, but what
would have happened if Sun had simply went bankrupt and the intellectual
property just disappeared?  It happened to a lot of technologies from
DEC when Compaq took over.

Yes, Oracle is a dominant database company, but there are other
databases out there that are FOSS which people could use:

o PostgreSQL
o Firebird

and some interesting ones coming out:

o MongoDB
o CouchDB

and there are other commercial database companies (Microsoft SQL, IBM's
DB2 anyone?) so the government might be loath to intervene under
anti-trust laws.

The petition is reasonably written, with reasonable alternatives.  I
just think that forcing Oracle to "sell off" something that Sun was
willing to pay 1 Billion dollars for just a year earlier on the premise
that Oracle would not manage it well is probably something that will not
fly.

On the other hand, I wonder how many government installations are
running MySQL at this point....not that it would or should influence
anything.

md