back to article MySQL's ex-boss demands Europe OK Oracle's Sun buy

MySQL's former CEO Marten Mickos is flying the flag for his fleeting former employer, sending a heartfelt plea to the European Union to wave through Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems. Mickos left MySQL earlier this year - just over a year after Sun bought his open source database outfit - after apparently becoming …

COMMENTS

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  1. Tom 7

    Out of the frying pan

    Oracles development plans for MySql:

    NT

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    He has a point

    Oracle needs to present the market as competitive. If the market is not perceived as competitive (and it frankly is not) sooner or later it will see something akeen the Microsoft and Intel cases in the EU queue.

    And Oracle is not so stupid as to pay voluntarily for the European economical recovery packages.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Anyone who seriously thinks Oracle will invest in MySQL ...

    ... to compete with its own core product is fecking dreaming. Mind you, a lot of OSS evangelists seem to live in world somewhat removed from reality so no surprises there.

  4. alien anthropologist
    Stop

    @boltar

    "..to compete with its own core product is fecking dreaming"

    Seems like you do not have the faintest clue about marketing and product management. What do you want.. someone else to compete with your product, or being able to compete yourself.. with yourself? Where will you find the most flexibility and profit?

    Jay Levinson was one of the first to recognise this tactic in the market place (and used by some of the very big boys) in his book "Guerrilla marketing".

    Oracle already has other database products in their stable. Berkely DB. Times10 DB. mySQL will not be an odd fit, or even an uncomfortable one.

    Look at IBM who owns both DB2 and Informix.

    The real question is what is Larry plans with mySQL.. as he will decide on the strategy. And he can be unconventional. He would also be quite familiar with "guerrilla" marketing too. mySQL provides Oracle Corp with *more* opportunities. Not less.

  5. Matt 21

    I'm with Boltar to an extent.

    I also can't see what the fuss is about. Oracle would have known the EU would have to investigate and they would have known how long that would take. I don't see why they should suddenly jump to the front of the queue.

  6. James Geldart

    Oracle needs MySQL

    Let's face it, Oracle is a premium, enterprise level product with an associated price tag. By owning MySQL and integrating it into their product range, they potentially get a lot of future customers out of those who will start out on MySQL Community Edition and then look to upgrade as their business grows. Those are the same people who will currently be buying MySQL Enterprise. By putting an upgrade path in place, it gives Oracle a far better opportunity to get at the mid-market than they currently have, so I think they'd be mad to kill it

  7. Victor 2

    except

    Except that MySQL does not compete with Oracle DB... it's aimed at a different target and it's one that Oracle can benefit from too, so it makes no sense to think they want it dead

  8. Hans 1
    Boffin

    @boltar & @allMySQLUsers

    You know, Oracle is not just "any" database. Oracle has a free of charge version of their database, too. MySQL cannot compete with the enterprise version of Oracle, no database (commercial or foss) on the market can, it cannot even compete with the free of charge Oracle version. Oracle have absolutely no interest in killing off mysql, they cannot, it has already forked, anyway. So even killing off mysql will lead them nowhere, they will be loosing mysql customers, who will be happy to implement the forked mysql clone ...

    I hope you guyz get it, now.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    WTF

    If the EU " should give the takeover the OK as quickly as possible", then how is it logical that " the EU was absolutely right to launch an investigation into the deal"?

    If they should OK the deal right away, then it was surely a waste of time and money to even launch an investigation.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    Trust Oracle? Never!

    What do you think Oracle will do?

    1) Increase Sun prices significantly similar to BEA WebLogic?

    (Oracle increased BEA prices 47% six months after acquisition)

    2) Kill Sun products and force migrations to other Oracle products?

    .Oracle is moving customers from their application server to

    WebLogic and requiring new licenses. Oracle also bought

    Virtual iron in May and killed the product in June.

    3) Lay off 20% to 50% of the Sun workforce.

    How else is Oracle going to turn Sun from “Bleeding $100M per month”(Larry) into

    a “$1.5B in profit engine in year one and $2B in year two” (Safra)

    4) Force services from partners to direct to increase profit margins

    and maintenance costs?. Oracle cut off maintenance revenue from BEA partners.

    5) Force customers to use low performance, low quality hardware

    to increase software license and software maintenance revenue?

    One Exadata v2 rack with “commodity” hardware costs $7M!!!!

    6) Stagnate MySQL so they don’t bleed billions from Oracle EE

    (What ever happened to WebLogic Lite?)

    Oracle has already shown they can not be trusted.

    Cheers from the UK

  11. Matt 21

    @Hans 1

    What do you mean no-one can compete with Oracle? What nonsense, Sybase and DB2 are both superior to Oracle in many ways. Even MSSQL Server can compete.

    Oracle is certainly not rubbish, it is a big company but it hasn't got a superior product.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Oh FFS

    Oracle have bought MySQL in the hope of upgrading its users to the Oracle DB. Larry would be quite capable of knocking out a cut-down version of Oracle to compete head-on in the MySQL arena if they though there was some money in it.

    Once Oracle have got as many former MySQL customers on board as they can then their version of the DB will be silently put out to grass and they'll leave it to the forked version to pick up any crumbs - ie the people who won't pay for anything. And if by some miracle the forked version starts to poach customers from Oracle then Larry can just dust off his old copy again , add some bells and whistles and start marketing it again. Just like car companies do with various badges they've aquired over the years.

    Christ you lot are naive.

  13. Matthew Barker

    Creators and their creations

    People are almost always attached to seeing their creations survive. It's an ego thing.

  14. Charlie Clark Silver badge
    Pint

    All hail Postgres

    It felt like there was a distinct uptake in Posgres development activity when Sun bought MySQL. It wouldn't suprise me if some users and developers jump the MySQL ship to Postgres in light of the developments with Oracle. Postgres hasn't forked and has a clear ugrade path to an (Oracle compatible) enterprise version if possible and an unambiguous licencing policy.

    Come aboard and who care what Oracle does?

  15. proto-robbie
    Boffin

    @alien anthropologist

    I live in a small Scottish town somewhat overendowed with fast food outlets. The owner of one of these emporia did quite well one year, and decided to expand by buying out another just two hundred yards down the road, creating another restaurant like the first.

    He since has learned unfortunately that it is better not to compete with oneself in a limited market, with twice the overhead and pretty much the same revenue.

  16. Jacqui

    Oracle - thier own worst enemy

    Oracle has (for the past five plus years) been its own worst enemy.

    My employer used to be a oracle reseller - mainly to gain access to bleeding edge DB products to integrate into our telecoms packages for companies like BT, Ericsson etc.

    Of course, we did not actually make many (direct) Oracle sales but were responsible for the selection of Oracle within many telcos etc. Oracle sales beancounters looked at our (probably) zero direct sales and cut us off.

    But the growing bloatware and insability issues were the last straw - we started the move to Postgresql and other alternatives.

    Oddly enough this does not directly affect many of our telco customers as they have (as much as you can eat) licences but the smaller telcos are seeing majors savings and quite significant performance boosts over the current Oracle "bloatware".

    I suggest Oracle move back to being a decent database provider. When you decided to become a applications and services provider, the bloat introduced into the core database (the bit we telco folks use most) hit us hard.

    Today Oracle only has limited benefits over Postgresql - and we have managed to work around the majority of these. For us migration is straighforward.

    Finally we *always* provided first line support for Oracle, so much so that we fixed a number of bugs in Oracle (pre-release testing was always a joke) - before Oracle had shipped production. Today those continuing glaring bugs hit production systems further impacting Oracles percieved quality as small (niche) businesses such as ours decide Oracle is no longer worth the cost and effort.

    Jacqui

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