Isn't Dvorak a self-admitted troll? It's quite obvious he either doesn't know about postgres, which means he didn't do any research for writing this article, or he does and he didn't mention it, which would mean he's trying to make his angle more legitimate than it really is.
I don't know, it kind of makes sense. You guys don't have nearly enough imagination for the level of common evil and machiavellianism in the typical C-suite. And for guys at the top of the money/power pyramid, like Larry, who got there through long experience with just this sort of corporate skullduggery and drama, they'd be underperforming their shareholders if they weren't doing this sort of thing.
Also remember that anyone at that level is completely insane.
Sun has, in fact, destroyed every acquisition they've ever gotten their paws on. That list he links to only goes back to 2002. The full set is a dizzying tower of failure.
My guess is that everybody will switch to Postgress or a fork of MySQL itself in no time if Sun will ruin MySQL.
Still it is not impossible that management style people at companies like Oracle and Sun are so stupid to don't realize this, or maybe it's the best they can do to mitigate the MySQL effect in the current situation, that is to continue the development in a way that makes MySQL uncomfortable in some way but still usable enough to slower the switching to other products.
It's kinda odd how blatantly he contradicts himself there. He seems to think Oracle wants to buy/kill mysql, and at the same time mentions that because it's open source, it can just be forked at any moment. Meaning that Oracle couldn't possibly kill it, they could, at best, force it to change names.
If mysql were Nike, it would be worth it for a competitor to pay a billion to force a name change. But anyone who even knows what mysql is would know instantly what happened.
I just ignore his stuff these days.