The New York Times posted an article called „Decision on Oracle a Test for Kroes“ where they cite me with a suggestion what should be done when allowing the merger – splitting off MySQL from Sun/Oracle.
I had some tweets about the situation and briefly chatted with Florian Müller whom everybody should know from 2004’s anti software patent EU campaign and who is acting as a formal advisor in the current EU observation regarding the deal. I believe in Open Source being „free as in freedom“. In the last months I haven’t heard anything from Oracle itself regarding its future plans for MySQL. And when I read this article („Oracle plans aggressive fight […]“) from PC World magazine I’m not sure if it would be quite a good thing that Oracle will own MySQL in the future. Does Oracle have experience in growing and maintaining an Open Source community accepting the dual-license nature of the software, and will it invest into MySQL?
By splitting off MySQL (i.e. selling it to another business) it has to be assured that there’s a company behind MySQL that thrives the further adoption of MySQL especially in the Enterprise Business. That’s why in the past decade MySQL grew from a small database to a great database server which suits a lot of enterprise needs for the web. I don’t want that industry fall back – the future is the web and the database for the web is MySQL.
I’m pretty sure that EU commisioner Kroes will do the right decision by end of January 2010.
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