Richard Stallman calls for Oracle to divest MySQL
Oracle must be stopped from taking over MySQL, according to Richard Stallman, a developer and prominent activist for free software.
Oracle must be stopped from taking over MySQL, according to Richard Stallman, a developer and prominent activist for free software.
Pretend you are Oracle CEO Larry Ellison for a minute (forget about the yacht and designer suits, though). You're spending $7.4 billion to buy Sun Microsystems and all of a sudden the EU antitrust posse frets about the fate of MySQL, the popular, open source database. Would you risk the acquisition because you want to remain the proud owner of a product that may or may not have revenue potential, or would you throw it overboard?
If you are a Wall Street investment analyst, the answer is pretty clear: Give it the heave-ho.
"MySQL is a baggage, not an asset," says Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research. Given the EU investigation and MySQL's paltry revenue growth, Oracle's only smart option is to spin it off, he says. But spin off to where?
There's another way forward, however, and it has been championed in a blog by Matthew Aslett, who follows open source for the 451 Group. "Oracle is well aware that it has little to gain from killing off MySQL. We expect MySQL to become the scale-out database for nontransactional web applications and to compete with SQL Server in departmental deployments."
Perhaps he's right. But it is far from clear that Oracle would do much with MySQL beyond channelling users toward its own larger and more expensive products.
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