In general, the activities of the big tech corporations have somewhat limited and indirect effect on nonprofit technology. For large enterprises, the activities of the big players is a much more immediate and important set of issues to deal with. For us, it’s generally much more removed.
However, today’s news that Oracle is going to buy Sun Microsystems has some very important implications. Why? It has to do with the fact that many, many nonprofit websites and web applications are built using MySQL, the most popular open source database management system. Sun bought MySQL AB (the company behind MySQL) last year for $1 Billion dollars, and therefore, MySQL AB now becomes a part of Oracle, it’s primary competition.
There is some suspicion that there may be anti-trust challenges because of this, but if it goes through, it raises some huge questions about what happens to MySQL because of this. Of course, since MySQL is open source, there is no danger of MySQL going away, someone can always fork it. And, ultimately there is a great open source database alternative called PostgreSQL, but support for it is not universal. However, the future of ongoing support and development for MySQL is certainly in question. Most nonprofits don’t get any support from MySQL AB directly, but larger organizations that might have been getting some support might see changes down the road.
It’s something that those of us who depend on MySQL for our web development projects will be watching quite closely.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree that the future of MySQL within Sun-Oracle may be uncertain, but there are other departments within Sun that are more worried. MySQL isn’t really a competitor of Oracle – let’s face it: the common LAMP-users won’t really consider Oracle, with it’s bloated resource requirements, suboptimal documentation and generally another target group.
Sun has been buying other database companies in the future, e.g. Clustra, a corporation-grade database used by financial institutions (and we’re not talking about their webpages here). The people of Sun Trondheim, which is mainly the old Clustra, probably have more reasons to be worried than most MySQL users have. Oracle is a direct competitor for their product – MySQL is not (even if Sun bundles them all in a Database division).
Sun may choose to discontinue MySQL support, but this will almost certainly not be because they will promote Oracle *instead*, but because they are not making enough money on it.
While I agree that this is something that we should be watching, I agree with Matt Mullenweg’s overall comments. MySQL is GPL licensed, so it will continue to be available to the community, and there are new forks of MySQL (Drizzle, for one) that are showing promise.