There were plenty of discussions about the acquisition of Sun by Oracle and the future of MySQL. Now, it seems the EU is going to approve the deal, as long as we can trust this article from Financial Times Germany. So far so good...please note that i don't want to rant about MySQL and the acquisition through Oracle (i really have no interest in this). However, this article lists comments from an EU comissioner involved in the decision making process, which makes me wonder.
According to the article, commissioner Neelie Kroes has concerns regarding to the acquisition, since Oracle might starve the development of MySQL to get rid of a competitor on the database market. Without MySQL, customers won't have a free alternative to commercial databases from Oracle, Microsoft and IBM anymore.
This is just crazy, if you look at the feature set PostgreSQL currently delivers (think of Window Functions, Recursive Queries). With the upcoming release PostgreSQL will catch up with Oracle Standby Options and will add extended SQL features like exclusion constraints. Commercial support isn't a problem, a look at the current list of support companies gives plenty of them. So there is still one alternative at least, but maybe i'm missing their point.
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The official EU press release explicitly mentions the availability of PostgreSQL, so your point is kind of moot:
"The Commission's investigation showed that another open source database, PostgreSQL, is considered by many database users to be a credible alternative to MySQL and could be expected to replace to some extent the competitive force currently exerted by MySQL on the database market. In addition, the Commission found that 'forks' (branches of the MySQL code base), which are legally possible given MySQL's open source nature, might also develop in future to exercise a competitive constraint on Oracle in a sufficient and timely manner."
I think what most people seem to be missing is that:
- MySQL competes in the DB market of open source databases, there certainly is one
- MySQL was used for some pretty big sites (e. g. Digg) because of what it offered over the other free (of charge) databases. If it didn't, would they buy commercial databases or would they use a free one, improve it and create/improve the tools they would need for them?
@onno: well, i was referring on the mentioned statements of Kroes in the past (see the provided link, but it's german, unfortunately). I was really glad to read the official statement today, too.
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