Objection to Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems (due to MySQL)

[robbat2]

Monty Widenius (one of the original authors of MySQL) has asked for help in lodging objections to Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems.

I have no objections to the EC posting my mail, but I thought to also post it here, and help spread the word.

Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 02:39:25 +0000
From: "Robin H. Johnson" <robbat2@isohunt.com>
Subject: Objection to Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems (due to MySQL)
To: comp-merger-registry@ec.europa.eu

Name: Robin H. Johnson
Title: Development Manager / Lead Developer
Company: IsoHunt Web Technologies Inc.
Size of company: (privately held)
How many MySQL installations: More than 10
Total data stored in MySQL (megabyte): More than 80000 (>80GB)
For what type of applications is MySQL used: Web index
Should this email be kept confidential by EC: No

I am concerned for the open-source health of MySQL if Oracle's plan to buy Sun
goes through in it's present form. When Sun bought MySQL, they made explicit
promises to uphold many of the open-source tenets of MySQL, and not did not try
to weasel out of them.

When Oracle bought Innobase (InnoDB being a key component inside MySQL):
- they became opaque to the outside world, no outside submissions were
  considered even from Sun/MySQL.
- Bugfixes were only done by contractual obligation, not by the spirit of
  improving open source and just fixing things that were broken.

Thus I do not believe the purchase of Sun (and by proxy MySQL) will benefit the
greater good.

Additionally, if you feel that Oracle purchasing IBM's DB2 division or
Microsoft's SQL Server division would be bad for the competitive market, the
same should be true for MySQL.

I ask that you take one of the following options
a) require Oracle to sell MySQL and not retain it.
b) require Oracle to make legally binding guarantees on the future of MySQL [1].
c) reject the deal completely.

[1]
Monty Widenius (one of the original authors of MySQL) has drafted a list of
proposed guarantees, which I reproduce here verbatim.
====
- All of MySQL will continue to be fully Open Source/free software in the
  future (no closed source modules)
- That development will be done in community friendly way.
- The manual should be released under a permissive license (so that one can
  fork it, the same way one can fork the server)
- That MySQL should be released under a more permissive license to ensure that
  forks can truly compete with Oracle if Oracle is not a good steward after                             
  all.
Alternatively:
- One should be able to always buy low priced commercial licenses for MySQL.
====

--
Robin Hugh Johnson
E-Mail     : robbat2@isohunt.com
GnuPG FP   : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED  F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85