[kwlug-disc] Newbie... Playing with Linux etc...

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Chris Bruner <cbruner at quadro.net> wrote:

> John Van Ostrand wrote:
>
>> Terry, I appreciate the point of view of not blindly defaulting to the
>> common choice. I also have that pet peeve as well, just not about MySQL.
>>
>>
> Any thoughts about Oracle and mysql, and the possible future problems with
> that?


I am going to cover some of that in my presentation on May 3rd.

In a nutshell:

Oracle already owned the transactional InnoDB engine that MySQL runs
on for several years, before they acquired Sun. If they had wanted to kill
MySQL then, it would have been easy to do it. They did not.

More importantly, MySQL is GPL. Oracle can only change the license for
future versions, but can't retake what is already out there. There are
several
community efforts based on the GPL version (will detail them in the
presentation).

Oracle can be several things, but they are not dumb. They know that there
is a market that their own DB can never dominate (web sites, startups, ...),
so they seem to want to keep MySQL alive for this, and perhaps have an
easy migration path to their own DB when someone outgrows MySQL.

If you were in their place, would you kill MySQL only to see PostgreSQL
take its place in that market place? These users will never go from
cheap/free and open source to expensive and closed source and dependent
on a commercial product. Or do you try to influence what is there?

As always, time will tell ...
-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
http://2bits.com
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. --  Edsger W.Dijkstra
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --   Leonardo da Vinci
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