It's tempting to speculate that
The reason:
Mickos talked with Forbes on Monday after the Oracle-Sun deal was announced.
Forbes: What's your initial reaction to the news that Oracle wants to acquire Sun?
Marten Mickos: It's amazing, and not entirely surprising. Oracle has the money and is a long-term, strategic player. They went into applications to compete with SAP and have successfully done this. Now they want to out-compete Microsoft.
Microsoft's database business is the fastest growing. Oracle can use MySQL to achieve a stronger developer community.
But doesn't that risk cannibalizing Oracle's database business?
MySQL is growing like crazy. That hasn't hurt Oracle. MySQL works for Web-based applications. Oracle is for older, legacy applications. Oracle might as well cannibalize themselves, then have someone else do it.
You don't think they'll just kill the business? They've let Siebel's online efforts languish and could do the same here.
They can kill the business. But I don't think they will. Larry Ellison is smart. MySQL was getting around 70,000 downloads a day when I left. It's an amazing grip on young developers. Having MySQL makes business sense for Oracle.
How will this deal impact MySQL's community of developers? One might say they're now working for "the man."
Any popular open-source project has multiple communities. They don't care who owns it. They care whether it works. There's a vocal minority that will say a lot about this. But MySQL has an installed base of 12 million. You and I pay attention to this stuff, but lots of developers probably don't even know MySQL is owned by Sun.
InnoDB (an open-source technology that Oracle acquired in 2005) is still very popular. It's run surprisingly autonomously. That's really the issue. Will Oracle run MySQL separately, or try to merge it with other groups? They could mess it up.
How?
By slipping it into the database division. Then you'll see turf wars. The power of MySQL is its openness. Oracle is different. They don't have their bug database public, for example. You risk losing the philosophy of MySQL and its edge in the market.
Or, there's a risk they give it away as a freebie. One of MySQL's strengths is that it has a business model.
But my belief is that Oracle's executives understand this.
So were Larry's anti-open source rants all bravado?
Yes, of course. I think he loves open source. I am just speculating, but he is an outside-of-the-box thinker. And it will allow him to compete creatively with Microsoft, his favorite enemy.
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