End of MySQL?

[Jerry Feldman]

On 04/22/2009 01:12 PM, Doug wrote:
> Hello:
>
> One of the strengths of open source is that we are not suppose to
> worry about the economics.  Does money make things better?  Debian is
> still Debian, but Mark Shuttleworth's money has made Ubuntu a version
> of Debian with greater reach.  I am not sure if Canonical is at
> break-even or not.
>
> Oracle is the great eater of other companies.  I have not watched
> their track record.  Eating up open source projects should be
> different though.  One business interest for Oracle behind the Office
> projects is how it will pressure their competition, Microsoft.  If
> their sales team has to sell boxes with software to enterprise users,
> they can say "Look, no lincensing fee/seat for word processing and
> spreadsheets".  That reason will drive them to put a polish on those
> projects.
>
>  =20
Actually, Oracle has a good reason to step in and buy Sun as IBM is a=20
major competitor of both Sun and Oracle.

-- Speculation --
I think if IBM had prevailed, they would have killed off Solaris and=20
Sparc the same way HP killed off Tru64 Unix and Alpha (well Compaq=20
actually killed the Alpha before HP acquisition). IBM also has had a=20
decent record in supporting Linux. I also think that had IBM acquired=20
Sun, that they would have tried to push their customers to use IBM's=20
database products. So, Oracle's motivation is to preserve their largest=20
vendor customer base. While Java may have been an important factor, it=20
is simply enterprise computing. Where Sun's other products, like MySQL,=20
StarOffice, VirtualBox, fit in, they possibly have not made any=20
decisions. Another important thing is where the current Sun management=20
integrates into Oracle. Part of this is how Oracle structures what was=20
Sun. Since there were people on Sun's board negotiating with IBM at the=20
same time others were negotiating with Oracle it might be interesting to =

see who stays. I think in the short term who stays and who leaves may=20
determine the future of MySQL, StarOffice/OpenOffice, Java, and Virtualbo=
x.
-- end speculation --

--=20
Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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