Oracle, Sun and MySQL Logos

Michael “Monty” Widenius, the founder and creator of MySQL, who now runs Monty Program Ab has been for long battling hard to save MySQL from the impending rot it could suffer under the hands of Oracle.

The story goes that Oracle plans to acquire Sun Microsystems who apparently owns MySQL after purchasing it a few years ago. Now it is feared that Oracle’s future plans for MySQL seem to be headed to the dumpster. It makes total sense seeing MySQL has been somewhat a pain in the butt for Oracle on some fronts especially as far as penetration into the website realm is concerned.

At first it wasn’t a great concern for Oracle seeing MySQL’s initial objectives were to simply provide a super fast relational database management system that was suitable for use on database driven websites.

The earlier versions of MySQL really didn’t pose a threat to Oracle and database systems as it lacked crucial features to enter the enterprise league. We are talking features such as Stored Procedures, Views, triggers and you know the whole shebang.

The inclusion of these features changed the whole game as MySQL started eating into the market that traditionally would belong to Oracle and its competitors which include but are not limited to Microsoft with their SQL Server, IBM’s DB2 and others.

To add to the onslaught Sun decided to Acquire MySQL a this must have woken up Oracle to a greater extent especially after Oracle had taken ownership of the database storage engine InnoDB a a few years before then.

Anyway there is now a very interesting Cat and Mouse game that has been going on as far as what Oracle’s intentions are towards MySQL. Oracle has repeatedly claimed that it’s intentions are for the best  for all stake holders.

The nature at which MySQL operates could really generate problems for Oracle and MySQL Licensees as well. For one, a lot of users of MySQL Enterprise Editions probably includes businesses that shunned Oracle in the first place in favor of MySQL so this is a slap in the face to all those businesses. Then there are the users using the community Edition, all the developers that contributed bug fixes, patches and entire Storage Engines. Also of great mention is the historical relationship between Oracle and the idea of Free & Open Source which has not been rosy at all.

I bet you see the point now.

So, anyway. Monty is now heading a campaign to see to it that Oracle doesn’t get its hands on MySQL. The Idea is they can buy Sun but give up MySQL generally on one or more of these terms:

1. MySQL must be divested to a suitable third party that can continue to develop it under the GPL
2. Oracle must commit to a linking exception for applications that use MySQL with the client libraries (for all programming languages), for plugins and libmysqld. MySQL itself remains licensed under the GPL.
3. Oracle must release all past and future versions of MySQL (until December 2012) under the Apache Software License 2.0 or similar permissive license so that developers of applications and derived versions (forks) have flexibility concerning the code.

There is a petition that is out there on  http://helpmysql.org. Here you can read more about the issues that have been brought up, read all about it and decide whether you agree with it or not. If you do go ahead and sign the petition.