I posed a question Jan 8 “You all should learn SQL” and got a bunch of interesting responses. Most of the “major” systems and software companies are using Microsoft SQL Server, I would guess. Oracle has been making a play into the manufacturing space…again. (I first heard about SQL and got an intro around 1988 from Oracle, I believe.) Well, Oracle’s acquisition of Sun finally received European approval. Sebastian Rupley of GigaOM has a post centered on a memo from Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO. Sun acquired the open-source SQL database competitor to Oracle–MySQL. It also developed and released (at least parts) to open source the programming language/platform Java. So, the question is–what will happen to MySQL and Java? Can Oracle put up with open source? What will all the companies that based low cost products (like Inductive Automation whose Steve Hechtman was the source of my question a couple of weeks ago) do? This is a serious question. Oracle’s Larry Ellison is not known for benevolance and being a nice guy. The first “owners” of MySQL are trying to get it back.
This is something we’ll have to watch carefully.
This is indeed an topic that we watch carefully.
The great hedge against any doomsday scenarios is that open source software, which both MySQL and Java are, is the fork. Oracle can’t really "own" them outright, no matter how hard they try. If they really do something draconian, which Ellison is known for, the OSS community will simply fork off the code and go their own direction. The greatest thing about this is that Oracle knows it – and if that were to happen, their investment would be seriously tarnished.
My guesses:
1) Oracle sits on MySQL as they continue the direction that Sun was already pushing it – paid support, and slowly but surely grow the difference between the "community" edition and the (more-stable) "enterprise" edition. Meanwhile, they’ll throw some PR at Monty Widenius to try and de-rail his efforts.
2) They’ll improve Java, trying to show that they’re doing it better than Sun did. This shouldn’t be too hard, Sun was pretty inconsistent with Java in some respects, seemingly only working either the client-side or the server-side at any given time. Owning the most popular programming language in the world (See the 2010 TIOBE report), and the one which is most heavily used internally in Oracle’s main lines of business and in compatible enterprise products, is a huge feather in their cap. Every CS student comes out of college today learning Java as a baseline. That means owning Java buys attention from the next generation of enterprise programmers – which will drive business to their enterprise database and applications products.
MySQL is one of the fundamental pillars of the open source LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.) It drives more than 100 million servers across the web.
I can imagine Oracle trying to slow things down, but the grassroots are huge. I can’t imagine they’d have success in stifling this fundamental open source pillar, at least in the long term.
Great ideas. There is precedent for support of open source as a business model. Red Hat has been going great guns with its Linux support model. And it is true that MySQL is very widely used. Of course, as open source, it could be "forked" by developers. Larry probably really wanted the servers. So, we’ll see.