Comments

• The Mad Hatter

  2009-04-21 07:50:50

  MySQL is fine - there is a community version, I think it's called MariaDB, which Oracle can't touch. Thank god for the GPL.
  
  As to the deal itself, I don't know whether I like it or not. Every merger hurts the market (less competition). On the other hand, Sun has been in bad shape for years, and the purchase by Oracle will ensure that some of Sun's technology will survive. The question is will Oracle continue to support Sun hardware, particularly Sparc? IBM probably wouldn't have continued Sparc, as it competes with Power. The issue as I see it is that we have lost a lot of chip technology in the last ten years. Alpha is dead. PA-RISC is dead. Itanium is on life support, if not actually dead. 68000 is dead.
  
  It's a pity, because some of those chips had some damned nice features.

• Roy Bixler

  2009-04-21 12:01:38

  I am well aware that Oracle can't eliminate MySQL entirely because it is licenced under the GPL. If it were proprietary software, they could eliminate it and perhaps wouldn't be able to resist the temptation. My concern was centered on what happens to commercially supported MySQL and my hope would be that they see that they can make money with it and that it doesn't hurt their flagship database much, so they will continue with it. Otherwise, due to the open source nature of MySQL, there also wouldn't be anything to prevent someone else from taking over the MySQL support business.

• Roy Bixler

  2009-04-20 21:52:59

  Frankly, I see this move as an attempt to preserve the status quo. Oracle perceived a threat if IBM would have bought Sun, which had been a steadfast partner with Oracle. The most interesting question is "what will happen to MySQL?", which earlier Oracle had been accused of making moves to marginalise even though the threat posed by MySQL was fairly minimal due to the fact that MySQL is not really an enterprise level database as is Oracle.
  
  Also, Larry Ellison hates Microsoft more out of envy than out of any ideological reasons. If Bill Gates and Larry Ellison traded positions, would Microsoft behave any better? I have my doubts.

• the11thplague

  2009-04-20 21:33:42

  Nice finding. Let's hope Oracle will continue all the great open source projects Sun started. At least it will stay far from Microsoft.

• Yuhong Bao

  2009-05-05 14:41:20

  "LARRY ELLISON hates Microsoft." Yep, they once hired IGI to do dumpster diving, which uncovered several MS front groups, many of which was discussed on Boycott Novell.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2009-05-05 16:55:44

  Do you have more information about that? I'd be interested.

• Yuhong Bao

  2009-05-05 22:25:05

  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,49039,00.html http://money.cnn.com/2000/06/28/technology/oracle/ http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-96149.html

• Yuhong Bao

  2009-05-06 01:21:41

  Some links on this: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,49039,00.html http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-96149.html

• Roy Schestowitz

  2009-05-06 06:23:34

  Thanks. This just shows how Washington is corrupt beyond repair.

• Yuhong Bao

  2009-05-06 06:51:56

  "This just shows how Washington is corrupt beyond repair. " Well, I would not go that far, but that is another off-topic mess entirely.