End of MySQL?

[Mark J. Dulcey]

Rich Braun wrote:
> The news broke yesterday:  Oracle to buy Sun.
> 
> Sun bought MySQL last year, leading to departure of several key developers and
> a fairly disastrous downturn in quality of support and QA.
> 
> The news media has said little about the anti-trust implications of Oracle
> taking over its lead competitor in the database server software market.  Even
> though the Bush Era is over, I doubt the US government will lift a finger to
> force divestiture of MySQL from Oracle.
> 
> That leaves European regulators, perhaps, or an open-source community
> initiative to take MySQL back.

Looks like there is already a project in place to take it back, with 
Monty Widenius heading it: MariaDB. See 
http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB  So far it's been low 
profile, but the Oracle buyout of Sun could be just the thing to build a 
lot of momentum behind Maria and MariaDB.