

What MySQL Founder Michael Widenius said about Oracle acquiring Sun - edw519
http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/04/to-be-free-or-not-to-be-free.html

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gamache
Blogspam: [http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/04/to-be-free-or-not-
to-...](http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/04/to-be-free-or-not-to-be-
free.html)

And a repeat at that.

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emilis_info
Business plan:

1\. Create a good product and a company. 2\. Sell the company for 1 billion.
(Profit!) 3\. Whine about how the new owner is bad and leave it. 4\. Start a
NewAndBetterMySQL company. 5\. ??? 6\. Profit?

Now seriously. If there will happen a confrontation between "Oracle MySQL" and
"OpenSource MySQL", I see two possible outcomes:

1\. Noone will pay 1 billion for NewAndBetterMySQL next time.

2\. The confusion between different versions of the database may mean, that
the "OpenSource MySQL" will lose the enterprise market for some time.

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yason
Perhaps Oracle indeed thinks that some very suitable confusion is worth some
serious money?

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liuliu
Is it strange or just me feel that way? How can a commercial entity buy open-
source product? The founder can easily start a new free branch of this product
because it is GPLed. Then, what is the 1 billion deal of MySQL all about?

~~~
gaius
MySQL was always dual-licensed.

But yeah, Monty has come out of this laughing. Sun effectively gave him a
billion dollars for a few months work, during which time all he did was whine
about them in his blog. Sun buying MySQL was a strategic blunder on the order
of eBay buying Skype.

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ocskills
"They will embrace MySQL and Open Source and put their technical expertise on
it to ensure that MySQL continues to be the most popular advanced Open Source
database."

That distinction rightly belongs to PostgreSQL:
<http://www.postgresql.org/about/>

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Radix
Notice that 'most' refers to 'popular' not 'advanced'. So, the point I believe
you were making has nothing to stand against. MySQL is very popular and is
also advanced.

~~~
gaius
It isn't even the most popular, that honour belongs to SQLite by a
considerable margin.

