In this blog I look beyond the obvious and try to find out why people and companies do what they do - and what it means for the rest of us. 
The EU is having an issue with Oracle buying Sun, because of mySQL. First, that’s absurd. It’s open source, it’s free, and it’s ridiculous to make a case of anti-trust/anti-competitiveness based on mySQL.
Having said that, it is what it is, and thus, here’s what will most likely now happen:
I have to believe that the EU – so violently in agreement with all things open source, will see that they screwed up and bless the deal. Along the way, Sun will continue to bleed to death – and it won’t have a blessed thing to do with mySQL.
Assuming the deal eventually passes, (which in and of itself, I still find nuts – but not because of something as goofy as mySQL – more like, it’s losing a trillion dollars….), the EU has pissed off Larry. Larry is one of the few people on the planet that it really isn’t good to piss off. He has more money than France – and he holds a grudge longer.
mySQL will remain free to all that want it. Some will want to pay Oracle for commercial support – the same way they do with Red Hat – and Oracle will actually make money on it (unlike Sun). Larry, however, will punish the EU by figuring out how to jack core Oracle licensing prices through the roof – because he has an effective monopoly at that layer and can do whatever it is he wants. Suddenly the dollar’s devaluation will cause a run up in transfer costs, and the good people of the EU will pay. Second, he’ll fire everyone he can in Europe, just because. I’m telling you, this is not a guy to piss off.
Why is this all happening? SAP. Mark my words. SAP is behind the battle here – and I’m not sure how EU companies can end up coming out ahead by irritating Larry. Seems a miscalculation to me.
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Remember the GE/Honeywell merger? Oh wait, that never happened because they blocked it. Probably because it would annoy Rolls-Royce and Airbus too much.
Larry does have a hell of a lot of money but Oracle is driven by quarter to quarter growth. Every time they need to pump the growth number they buy something and when it’s added in they can say they experienced whatever % year over year growth.
In 07 they said they’d grow to $50B in revenue within five years, it’s a shot away from 2010 and they’re at $23B. This is after buying everyone in their market that they can get their hands on and being the only one to raise prices by close to a fifth in a duff market.
Unlike the DOJ who appears to change their mind every time a new first lady picks out a new set of drapes for the Oval Office the difference here is that the Eurocrats think in decades. Larry could still win the day but if the person from Brussels says Non or Nein commissioners will come and go but the answer won’t change.
Having been missing in action for months it would be interesting to see someone at Sun’s top level appear to tell the world they are still a stand alone company if this deal fell through. It is as if they just turned the lights out and went home.
I don’t know… I think Oracle’s response is fairly telling. It should be approved because Oracle & MySQL don’t compete against each other. Having both in my environment, he’s correct they hardly every go head-to-head; but I have seen transitions from both environments: some smaller instances away from Oracle to MySQL and some MySQL to Oracle. What this shows me is that Oracle will intentionally keep some of the more (at least to me) critical features out of MySQL, i.e. backup to tape + incremental. Features that would actually compete on the lower tier with traditional Oracle DB’s.
Sure I could technically try and fork off MySQL and rename it something completely different (as I wouldn’t be able to use the trademarked name held be Oracle) and add those competing features in but have fun in getting much traction in any large scale. I have limited faith that Oracle wants MySQL to succeed with more production level features as it would be detrimental to their (as you say) monopoly profit producer.