I wonder what this means for the future of MySQL.
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Oracle owns InnoDB and Sleepycat/BerkeleyDB, both of which are in active development. InnoDB is also MySQL's most popular storage engine. So I wouldn't fear for MySQL's future. It wasn't doing well in Sun anyways.
Now MySQL doesn't have to implement a new engine to replace InnoDB (their previous motivation for the new engine was to keep control of it away from Oracle).
And now they will have to implement a whole new company. Sigh, I want to feel optimistic about this buyout, but somehow I don't.
Monty already left Sun last month to start his own fork of MySQL.
The Open Source golden parachute.
Let's wait and see if he actually makes any money before we call it "golden".
I think the billion dollar exit and then quick departure would be the referenced golden parachute.
OurSQL?
MySQL and Oracle excel in different areas. I would expect Oracle to halt any effort to grow MySQL towards Oracle's feature set.
I suspect this is very bad news for Postgresql. Sun is a major backer, but that will likely end. Postgresql's target market already overlaps with the low-mid end of Oracle's, and Postgresql 8.x has been largely about scaling up.
"I suspect this is very bad news for Postgresql. Sun is a major backer [...]"
Actually, that's incorrect; Sun is a backer, but hardly a major one.
A quick glance at Ohloh's contribution metrics for PostgreSQL (http://www.ohloh.net/p/postgres/contributors/) shows 17 committers with over 100 commits. If you start matching nicks up to the PostgreSQL contributor profiles (http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/), you'll quickly see that only one, Peter Eisentraut, works for Sun.
Actually, it's interesting to note that of those 17 top contributors not a single company employs more that one top contributor.
If anything this is good news for PostgreSQL, then: Oracle can easily acquire and steer the course of MySQL development, but shifting PostgreSQL priorities by financial means would take the acquisition of Sun, IBM, UC Berkeley, and over a dozen more companies.
"you'll quickly see that only one, Peter Eisentraut, works for Sun"
True, but Josh Berkus also worked for Sun until last summer. So maybe it's correct to say Sun has been a major backer.
Even when Josh worked there I think you'd be hard-pressed to make an argument that Sun "backed" PostgreSQL in any strategic sense.
It's true that Josh is an extremely vital figure in PostgreSQL's community, but he doesn't contribute code as much as he advocates and interacts with the user community. Those roles are extremely important, but the people who hold them are pretty much beyond outside influence: Josh will always act in the best interests of PostgreSQL regardless of who signs his paychecks.
On top of that, these types of evangelists don't usually play a part in the technical direction of a project. I'm not sure exactly how closely involved Josh is personally with PostgreSQL's technical direction, but I can tell you for a fact that any attempts a company might make to steer a project through its evangelist are misguided.
Either way, though, there's no question that Josh is incredibly important to PostgreSQL. But, still, that's a whopping two contributors out of over two dozen.
We can go back and forth about what level constitutes "major backing", and that's fine. But at least now we're talking about some data instead of just hand-waving; that was my point in posting the initial correction.
Yes, one area where MySQL excels is it doesn't cost $40k per server to have an unlimited (e.g. wired up to the internet, so anyone can use) license.
PG said in one of his rants, "Do you know of any start ups choosing to go with Oracle? I don't either."
A whole new generation of companies (like RoR dev shops) are using Postgre/MySQL as clusters/shards and have no intention to ever moving to Oracle. This way, Oracle still captures revenue from them. (If they are paying for support).
Well, losing Sun as a backer would be bad for PostgreSQL, definitely, but as far as the future goes, for PostgreSQL the sky is still the limit, for MySQL the limit now seems to be Oracle.
Wouldn't other hardware vendors be more interested in supporting PostgreSQL now? Before the acquisition, if you bought a big HP database server, HP had no reason to care which database software you ran on it. Now, HP would prefer that you not be directing your software-purchase money to one of HP's competitors.
Amusingly, before they bought MySQL, Sun were the biggest PostgreSQL supporters. They still employ the key contributors!
Sun employes one member of the core team (Peter Eisentraut) and some other people who contribute patches, but that's it.
And actually, I forgot that Peter E. left Sun a few weeks ago anyway:
http://petereisentraut.blogspot.com/2009/03/sun-set-part-2.h...
I'm thinking Oracle/Sun will eventually end up in HP's hands.
Why? Oracle has a larger market capitalization than HP: ~90 billion vs. 84.
Because Oracle and HP are already tight partners and analysts refer to them as essentially one entity against IBM. Plenty of people expect the Sun hardware line to die or get sold to HP, while Oracle keeps the software line.
http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/6606-0-0-225-121....
Now that it has aqcuired Sun, it can make those Exadata appliances itself, without HP. That's basically what Oracle said they were going to do today.
How will that work? Oracle's market cap is higher than HP's.
I would definitely be concerned about any future innovation of MySQL. Perhaps, it will get folded into Oracle's Express edition and then slowly phased out over time. Any advances that put MySql even remotely close to Oracle in terms of scalability are unlikely to occur.
It would be really weird if the future for MySQL involved PL/SQL. I can definitely imagine a world where it's not exactly free anymore.
Anyone at the MySQL conference today (April 20)?
I'm at MySQLConf. The Oracle deal is all I've heard talk of so far, and I don't expect that will change over the next few days.