Wake on LAN

[Mark J. Dulcey]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Before we pronounce judgment, let's look at Oracle. Does MySQL really 
> compete with Oracle? For the smaller businesses, Oracle is not a 
> solution, and probably not where Oracle really wants to be. There are 3 
> general outcomes:
> 1. Oracle really does not care about MySQL and spins it off.
> 2. Oracle sees MySQL as a way to strengthen its place in the market, and 
> provides resources to improve MySQL
> 3. Oracle decides that MySQL is not worth their while, so they treat it 
> as a step child and quietly kill it.
> 
> I really think that Oracle gains from step 2. I don't see a large 
> overlap between MySQL users and Oracle users, but by supporting and 
> improving MySQL, they gain some market. But, I've also seen some stupid 
> decisions where companies acquire another company, alienate the clients, 
> and the clients go to a competing product.  MySQL has a lot of product 
> loyalty.

The catch is that increasingly MySQL DOES compete with Oracle. Recent 
versions have added features needed for large enterprises and improved 
performance for large databases. The result is probably not so much that 
existing large companies switch, but that small companies stay with 
MySQL as they grow rather than reaching a point where their database 
needs are too big and switch to Oracle.

I would expect Oracle to chop off that trend off at the knees and halt 
the development of any features that makes MySQL work better for large 
enterprises. They might continue to promote it as a small business 
solution, but their emphasis will be on convincing people to switch as 
soon as they can persuade them to.

Fortunately, MySQL is an open source product, so the community can take 
over and continue development in directions that Oracle chooses not to 
pursue. That will mean less adoption of MySQL for large databases in the 
near future as that use will no longer have a big company behind it, but 
at least existing MySQL users will have a growth path, albeit one that 
leaves the protection of the corporate security blanket, should they 
choose to take it.

I don't think we can dismiss the possibility that Oracle will spin off 
MySQL. (Selling it to another company seems less likely, both because 
Oracle wouldn't care to help out a direct competitor and because of the 
lack of likely suspects.) We have a new regime in Washington so it's not 
inconceivable that the US DOJ will make a move, and the EU equivalent 
has been quite aggressive in antitrust cases against American companies. 
A best case scenario might be to reunite MySQL with the Monty Program 
people (the new company run by Monty Widenius and some of the original 
MySQL developers who left Sun) with backing from Oracle and some 
additional venture capital (necessary because Oracle would have to be a 
minority investor to satisfy the antitrust concerns).

All in all, I think the Oracle buyout of Sun is a bad move for everyone 
involved, not just the open source community. Another big problem I see 
ahead; if Oracle keeps the server hardware business and markets bundled 
hardware/software solutions, the channel conflict with other server 
manufacturers might cause them to deemphasize Oracle and push other 
databases. And if Oracle DOESN'T keep the server business, why buy Sun 
at all? I don't see enough value in Solaris, Java, and MySQL to justify 
the 7 gigabuck price tag.