Oracle Set To Win Battle For MySQL
The standoff between Oracle and the antitrust regulators of the European Commission has finally been broken, according to knowledgeable sources, and that an agreement is imminent.
There are other ramifications. Oracle, with another of its most important database competitors safely within its own jurisdiction, will be watched like a hawk by a very steamed MySQL community. Other open-source advocates and anybody who has anything to do with the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Ruby) enterprise stack outside the MySQL realm will do likewise.
That the EC now believes the Oracle fox watching over the MySQL chicken coop will remain on his honour for five years took quite a bit of doing. But Oracle’s ploy worked, and for three major reasons:
No. 1: A 10-point checklist of capitulations drawn up by Oracle and presented to the EC over the weekend of 12 and 13 december and published 14 December following the nasty hearings. Oracle’s appearance of humility here did the political trick, eWEEK learned.
Where that list came from is the subject of some talk. Was it thoughtfully drawn up by the Oracle legal team, with help from such international open-source stars as MySQL’s Zack Urlocker, Oracle Linux guru Wim Coekaerts or Sun Linux expert (and Debian Linux co-creator) Ian Murdock? Or was it simply drawn from the blog of MySQL co-creator Michael (Monty) Widenius, who laid out on a platter on 12 December what Oracle needed to do to recover from the disaster it experienced in the EC hearings? (Oracle’s lead counsel was angry enough to have uttered: “We’ll see you in court” at the end of the hearings.)
No. 2: It didn’t hurt that some hugely important multinational Oracle and MySQL customers – Ericsson was one of them – came to the aid of the company, explaining firsthand how much they used both Oracle and MySQL and why it would cripple their IT operations if Sun were to permanently sunset.
No. 3: The influence of the wizard behind the curtain, Larry Ellison. The consensus among analysts and industry people is this: What Larry wants, Larry usually gets.
It’s been a rocky road this year for Oracle and Sun, which is losing a lot of potential sales due to the uncertainty of the situation. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell and other companies haven’t been shy about reminding customers and potential customers about Sun’s travails during the last year.
There is always the chance that some other factor could derail the deal before 27 January, but it’s not likely. The people that matter – EC’s senior competition directorate, dubbed DG Comp, for Director General-Competition – seem satisfied that MySQL will continue to thrive with Oracle as its new mothership.
