Comments on: Why you should care that Oracle is buying Sun http://zenofnptech.org/2009/04/why-you-should-care-that-oracle-is-buying-sun.html Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:27:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Chris http://zenofnptech.org/2009/04/why-you-should-care-that-oracle-is-buying-sun.html/comment-page-1#comment-6563 Chris Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:04:33 +0000 http://www.zenofnptech.org/?p=506#comment-6563 While I agree that this is something that we should be watching, I agree with Matt Mullenweg's overall <a href="http://ma.tt/2009/04/oracle-and-open-source/" rel="nofollow">comments</a>. 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. 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.

]]> By: Magni http://zenofnptech.org/2009/04/why-you-should-care-that-oracle-is-buying-sun.html/comment-page-1#comment-6562 Magni Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:05:16 +0000 http://www.zenofnptech.org/?p=506#comment-6562 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. 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.

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