Oracle to sabotage MySQL?

Since Oracle’s controversial acquisition of Sun, the fate of MySQL, an Oracle competitor, and indeed acquired technologies in general, have been debated back and forth around IT communities. Many are convinced that Oracle will do as much as possible to eradicate MySQL. This week, Monty Widenius, main author of MySQL, threw another cat amongst the pigeons by announcing that he will set up a database to consolidate work on MySQL.

Widenius’ new project, the Open Database Alliance, will be made up from companies that currently offer software, support and services for MariaDB, a branch of MySQL. Widenius said: "Our goal with the ODA is to provide a central clearing house for MySQL development, to encourage a true open development environment with community participation, and to ensure that MySQL code remains extremely high quality.

"Participating members at this stage will have a strong voice in how the organisation is structured, and we look forward to collaborating with anyone in the industry that provides or depends on MySQL."

Simon Ellis, Chief Technical Officer at Inatech, said that perhaps Oracle should avoid upsetting the open source community for the sake of market dominance: “The open source community has not taken well to Oracle’s ‘acquisition’ of MySQL.

“If Oracle has truly no intentions of changing the mysql roadmap, perhaps it should ‘sell it back’ to the open source community. “

That said, Ellis went on to comment that, given the circumstances, now could be the perfect time for users to switch from MySQL and enjoy potential advantages of the enterprise Oracle stack: “By now controlling MySQL gives Oracle a really strong position in the open source community and a fantastic opportunity to ‘migrate’ people onto the enterprise oracle stack via offering potentially tighter integration of tools and technologies.”

Users, however, may be more loyal to open source than Oracle have perhaps imagined. Ellis noted: “There is risk that MySQL code base will split, which will dilute Oracle’s position. This is a real tester to see how organisations that deem themselves ‘open source’ friendly deal with acquiring open source technology and interact with the open source community.

“By embracing open source there is a danger that your revenue streams become diluted and your brand messaging becomes confused.”

The development of MySQL under Oracle is likely to be a lengthy process, with the potential for casualties both within the open source community and for Oracle. As Ellis summed up, no amount of predictions can clarify MySQL’s future; “this one is not over by a long shot,” he mused.