The MySQL petition

[Tom Buskey]

On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 6:16 PM, Jon 'maddog' Hall <maddog at li.org> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
Sun benefited from MySQL also.  When sales went in to sell support, they
found the customer was already using it.  Sun didn't have to convince them
to switch products.  This is a good thing for any company looking to
fund/buy an open source product.


> 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.
>

An **lots** of products use it.  I'm thinking sqlite, Sun's LDAP use it or a
varient.

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.
>

I'm still supporting a Tru64 system.  Phased out in favor of HP-UX on
itanium.  To be replaced with Linux on itanium *sigh*.

I remember trying the binary translator for SunOS to OSF/1 back in the day.
It was very nice.  I suspect there will be a market for something like that
for Intel Windows or Windows CE to ARM Linux in the coming years.


> On the other hand, I wonder how many government installations are
> running MySQL at this point....not that it would or should influence
> anything.
>
>
And more importantly, how many are paying for support.  Oracle won't  want
to walk away from that revenue and it also help the OSS community.
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