Blogspam: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/04/to-be-free-or-not-to-...

And a repeat at that.

Business plan:

1. Create a good product and a company. 2. Sell the company for 1 billion. (Profit!) 3. Whine about how the new owner is bad and leave it. 4. Start a NewAndBetterMySQL company. 5. ??? 6. Profit?

Now seriously. If there will happen a confrontation between "Oracle MySQL" and "OpenSource MySQL", I see two possible outcomes:

1. Noone will pay 1 billion for NewAndBetterMySQL next time.

2. The confusion between different versions of the database may mean, that the "OpenSource MySQL" will lose the enterprise market for some time.

Perhaps Oracle indeed thinks that some very suitable confusion is worth some serious money?

Maybe (really hoping) Drizzle will be better for the web. For enterprise, Postgres

Is it strange or just me feel that way? How can a commercial entity buy open-source product? The founder can easily start a new free branch of this product because it is GPLed. Then, what is the 1 billion deal of MySQL all about?

MySQL was always dual-licensed.

But yeah, Monty has come out of this laughing. Sun effectively gave him a billion dollars for a few months work, during which time all he did was whine about them in his blog. Sun buying MySQL was a strategic blunder on the order of eBay buying Skype.

Which is exactly what Monty has done: http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB

However, MySql is also sold under a commercial license. Furthermore, MySql support was offered by Sun since they bought it, generating some income. Whether that is worth 1 billion I don't want to speculate.

"They will embrace MySQL and Open Source and put their technical expertise on it to ensure that MySQL continues to be the most popular advanced Open Source database."

That distinction rightly belongs to PostgreSQL: http://www.postgresql.org/about/

Notice that 'most' refers to 'popular' not 'advanced'. So, the point I believe you were making has nothing to stand against. MySQL is very popular and is also advanced.

It isn't even the most popular, that honour belongs to SQLite by a considerable margin.