End of MySQL?

[Dan Ritter]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 01:40:30PM -0400, Rich Braun wrote:
> The news broke yesterday:  Oracle to buy Sun.
> 
> Sun bought MySQL last year, leading to departure of several key developers and
> a fairly disastrous downturn in quality of support and QA.

And spurring several forks, at least one of which is backed by a
(new) company, and another one of which is dedicated to a
smaller, lighter MySQL system.

> That leaves European regulators, perhaps, or an open-source community
> initiative to take MySQL back.

The communities have been doing that since Sun bought MySQL AB.

> There's always PostreSQL.  But the big picture seems to be this:  large
> software companies have found a way to co-opt the most popular open-source
> applications in a now-routine 3-step process:  (1) put up some money to help
> development, (2) hire a team and adopt the core technology, then (3) put the
> whole thing up for sale on Wall Street.  Highest bidder is invariably the
> largest/most-expensive rival.
> 
> Is that what's going to happen to the rest of the open-source world?

No, only the ones which don't have real communities and aren't
backed by real open-source licenses.


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