When the news broke that Oracle wanted to buy Sun, a number of eyebrows were raised over what would happen to Sun’s open source portfolio. While the US Department of Justice gave the green light for the deal to go through, the European Commission was among the eye brows raising crowd, and they were quite worried about the future of specifically MySQL.
Oracle is one of the world’s largestproprietary database software companies, and them buying Sun, the leading open source database company (because of MySQL) has the European Commission worried. “In the current economic context, all companies are looking for cost-effective (information-technology) solutions, and systems based on open-source software are increasingly emerging as viable alternatives to proprietary solutions,” commissioner Neelie Kroes explained, “The commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available.”
Between then and now, Oracle published a large advertisement in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal, making several promises about the future of Sun’s SPARC and Solaris departments. Oracle promises to invest a whole lot more into SPARC and Solaris than Sun ever did. In addition, Oracle wants to integrate SPARC, Solaris, and Oracle software to provide a complete package.
However, in that advertisement, Oracle had nothing to say about the future of MySQL, the prime reason for the European Commission’s worries. One of the possible remedies under investigation by the EC is Oracle spinning off MySQL. This, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has stated, will not happen, because MySQL and Oracle do not compete at all.
“MySQL and Oracle do not compete at all,” Ellison said, “If you look at where we compete it’s with DB2, Microsoft’s SQL Server, Sybase, and a long list of others. We never compete against mySQL, it addresses very different markets.” Ellison is worried about the delays, explaining it only hurts Sun. “The longer this takes, the more money Sun is going to lose,” he said.
He also further reiterated Oracle’s commitment to the SPARC business. “We are keeping everything,” said Ellison, “We’re keeping tape. We’re keeping storage. We’re keeping x86 technology and SPARC technology – and we’re going to increase the investment in it. Sun has fantastic technology. We think it’s got great microprocessor technology – it needs a little more investment, but we think it can be extremely competitive.”
Ellison has his sights set on what he calls the ‘old’ IBM. “I would like us to be the successor to IBM,” he said, “Not Gerstner’s IBM. Not Palmisano’s IBM. But when IBM was the dominant software company in the world and translated that to being the dominant systems company.”
As silly as this sounds, my little Sun Ultra V, powered by a 64bit UltraSPARC IIi processor, is very happy. She may not be used very often, but she’s happy her offspring will be given an opportunity to grow.
IS Larry saying that Oracle will focus on enterprise business applications (SAP, Peoplesoft, inventory management, Other applications I know nothing about) where people are already paying huge sums for more than just the database? And Oracle will never compete in a web 2.0 OLTP load? Or data wherehousing?
Or is he saying that they will not let Mysql improve to challenge Oracle in the areas where Oracle is superior, keeping Mysql off of systems with greater than 8 cores and preventing Mysql clusters maturation.
He doesn’t really seem to be saying anything here about what they’ll be focusing on. He’s just saying that they’re not getting rid of anything from Sun and that they’re going to invest more heavily in some portion of it than Sun did.
As for MySQL, he’s not saying much about it except that it addresses a different market than Oracle’s DB stuff does, so he doesn’t consider them to be competing products. And since, MySQL is part of the “everything” from Sun, MySQL obviously isn’t going away. However, what exactly Oracle intends to do with it (other than to continue to support it), he doesn’t really say.
I think that it’s premature to say that this means anything bad for MySQL. It could be bad. It could be good. He’s not really saying much more than that they’re not getting rid of it and that it’s sticking around.
Sure, MySQL doesnt compete now. And if Oracle owns it, it never will. The question is, could it? I am no DBA expert, but MySql seems to have quite a bit of traction and I really don’t like seeing Oracle own it. But that is my opinion.
Thats not the end of the world. People interested in non Oracle Mysql can support and use MariaDB project http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB from bunch of creators of original MySQL.
Gives it a better foothold I believe.
A more complete picture of what Ellison said is here:
http://blog.internetnews.com/dneedle/2009/09/ellison-sun-losing-100…
I hope he has extremely deep pockets, that’s all I’ve got to say.
They tried to acquire MySQL for $750 million before Sun snapped them up for a billion. They already own the core technology originally for it (InnoDB) so it should be good having those communities coming back together…
People that thought Oracle didn’t have plans for MySQL forget facts too quickly… although it will likely mean that Oracle will always ensure their own products add value to it – MySQL AB already made money by not opening everything they offered… what changes there? Nothing except Oracle – the guys that made us need a database – adding to it, hardly a bad thing.
Oracle has been on board with open source almost as long as IBM, they too do “Mixed Source” but that mixed source includes a LOT of investment in Open Source.
Don’t be surprised to see MySQL targeted more at their Fusion middleware, with their core Enterprise business remaining as is.
Edited 2009-09-22 23:12 UTC
The MySQL comments certainly aren’t news. You’re right. Yes, I doubt whether Oracle will let MySQL compete too much with Oracle’s database products but it isn’t going to fall off the edge of a cliff.
Well, I mean, I’d think they’d start offering parts of their traditional database software as an upgrade… OracleDB wasn’t really designed for the web, but Fusion was… easier to just use something else that was designed for the web… aka MySQL
MySQL is very popular and open source. If Oracle becomes stupid and tries to damage the product to keep their database superior we can always fork the code and move on. This has happened before and the forks are successful most of the time. This is really up to the community at large. If it thinks Oracle is being a good custodian then they will help Mr. Ellison. On the other hand if the community thinks that MySQL is being damaged they will take appropriate measures.
As a developer that uses MySQL, I’ll be happy to help in either case. However, lets hope Oracle does the right thing and pushes MySQL forward to be a first class database for business and hobby usage.
Greg
The focus on the two are too different to warrant termination…
I would suspect Oracle will engage with OpenDatabase
Sun was already the one to be stupid and the original founder of MySQL already has a fork.
http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB
The reason why Oracle bought over SUN are because
1) Oracle need Java more than anyone else.
They have integrated Java with their Oracle database from version 10g onwards.
If Java is taken control by another rival. Oracle will die instantly.
2) Oracle need a low end database product for small and medium size companies that could not afford the over bloated Oracle database. MySQL is perfect for the job. Therefore, they will not kill MySQL.
3) Oracle have discovered why IBM’s customers don’t want to switch to Oracle ? IBM’s customers need the hardware (AS400). Hardware is necessary to lock in customer. Now Oracle have the hardware to lock in the customer.