Oracle May 'Fork Itself' With MySQL Moves

New submitter packetrat writes "Ars Technica analyzes the recent commercial additions by Oracle to MySQL Enterprise and the additional unrest it's added to the community. Oracle may be throwing itself out of the community as it pushes more customers to look at fully open-source alternatives."

Re:Surely only an issue for Windows...

[Errol backfiring]

Just out of curiosity, I did upgrade to MariaDB about a week ago, and I was pleasantly surprised how easy the transition went.

I dont get the discussion

[drolli]

Oracle offers some added value if you need it. If you are stuck on mysql for some reason and you project outgrew what the free verions handles, it may be reasonable to pay some money for well defined support of new features.

If you don't need it (and that applies to me and most people here), then just happily use the free version. If you are not convinced the support for the new features is worth the money, then don't buy it.

So, yes, oracle may have forked it. They are neither the first company to do something like this (see ghostscript) nor will they be the last. History shows that usually the commercial "value-added" distribution may be marginal in the installed base, but if the company plays the cards right its customers and the company can profit from the commercial version.