Mickos Urges EU To Approve Oracle's MySQL Takeover 67
mjasay writes "Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has written to EU Commissioner of Competition Neelie Kroes to urge speedy approval of Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun, including the open-source MySQL database. The EU has been worried that Oracle's acquisition of Sun could end up hurting competition by dampening or killing MySQL's momentum. But in his letter, Mickos separates MySQL-the-community from MySQL-the-company, arguing that Oracle's takeover cannot hurt the MySQL community: 'Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close, mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But, most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.' In a follow-up interview with CNET, Mickos indicated that he has no financial interest in the matter, but instead argues he 'couldn't live with the fact that [he's] not taking action,' and is 'motivated now by trying to help the employees still at MySQL and Sun, and by an urge to bring rational discussion to the matter.'"
Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
Too often, technically-knowledgeable people don't recognize or accept the need for them to be social leaders.
Fork it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Alternatives (Score:5, Insightful)
Moving from one database system to another is no trivial matter, even if that other system is a fork.
I agree with Marten Mickos here. There's no benefit to dragging this process out. If Oracle owning MySQL would be a problem, the time to fix it was months ago (I realize that may have been impossible); leaving it in extended purgatory is worse. MySQL has some degree of protection by using the GPL license, anyway.
Disclaimer: I'm a PostgreSQL user, and I haven't used MySQL for a while.
Re:Let them (Score:4, Insightful)
Were Oracle to kill of MySQL and there to be One True Fork that everyone switches to, that'd be fine. But there isn't. There're several, and they seem to be multiplying.
Re:Not so fast (Score:1, Insightful)
I got modded down to negative numbers last time I suggested this but perhaps the European Commission is looking for a new revenue stream since it looks like MS won't be supporting them anymore.
Re:what competition? (Score:3, Insightful)
Completely different use-cases.
There's some truth to that, but that's hyperbole. The use cases are not disjoint.
Additionally, MySQL may represent a general shift away from the traditional SQL architecture towards things like MySQL and non-SQL database systems. In some sense, Oracle is not just fighting to keep its customers on Oracle, it's trying to keep customers using traditional SQL systems.
I happen to think that the traditional SQL architecture is a pretty good one, and much better for general purpose development than the alternatives. But some people disagree, and Oracle doesn't want to lose part of the market, even if that part of the market is misguided.