By Jonathan Bowen

Back in April of 2009, Oracle bought Sun Microsystems.  When they did this they obviously acquired technology owned by Sun such as Java, Open Solaris, Netbeans, Open Office and MySQL.  When this happened, the open source community had collective apoplexy.  There were certainly worries about Open Office and Open Solaris, but the most disturbing thing was that none of us could see how Oracle could allow MySQL to survive as it was a major, if not THE major competitor to Oracle’s DB.

As a developer, 99% of my databases have been written in MySQL, and none of them used an Oracle product.  In fact, MySQL seems to be the most ubiquitous database system on the web.  Naturally, I was worried as well, even though Oracle released a statement indicating that it would keep MySQL going.  I, along with most of the rest of the Open Source community, was mistrustful of this as they failed to even MENTION MySQL in their initial statement.  I was relieved when Monty Widenius and a crew of other developers forked MySQL into MariaDB.  I will be examining MariaDB in depth in future articles, but suffice it to say that when the creator of MySQL indicated he would continue with a database system that one could just install and have it still work just like MySQL, it was a good feeling.

How about Oracle’s commitment to the technologies they acquired?  Well, it seems as if they are letting OpenSolaris die on the vine, but the other ones I mentioned seem to be thriving.  I was thinking that they would mothball NetBeans in favor of their preferred IDE, Eclipse.  I use both, so it did not matter THAT much, but I did notice that my Net beans updated last month to a new version.  Open Office still seems fine, and I think that Oracle will pour a lot of development money into it to compete against Microsoft Office.  Clearly, Java is not going anywhere and in fact will probably benefit from Oracle’s support of it.

The big question, though, is how is MySQL doing.  Well, it seems that it is actually still thriving, quite honestly.  When I thought about it from a business standpoint, it made sense.  Oracle really has no reason to deep six MySQL.  MySQL is the best branded database in the world, in my opinion, i.e. the most recognized.  From Oracle’s standpoint, think of how many sales that will drive to them.  I did check to see if it was still free to download, and one can still get “MySQL Classic” for free along with all the other paid versions of it.  The classic version seems to work well on the tests I put it through.

Perhaps, we need to accept that it does not matter who actually owns the Open Source technology, but rather their commitment to the Open Source philosophy.  One can see the argument that Oracle is committed to Open Source, just as they said.  If one goes the the MySQL web pages, they all seem to look the same as always.   I would be willing to bet that a majority of developers do not even realize that Sun owned MySQL, much less that Oracle owns it now.

That being said, Oracle’s main interest is in making money.  That is obviously the interest of any business, and is not inherently evil or anything of the sort.  It just means that if Oracle decides that it can make more money with MySQL gone, MySQL will die quickly and probably with little warning.  This is why it is a good idea to look into MariaDB and other database technologies to be prepared for any eventuality.

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