Many providers embedd MySQL with their commercial products including Adobe, Macfee, Nokia, Symantec and ScienceLogic just to name a few. In addition most commercial third party storage engines have for years been forced to provided very customized versions of MySQL due to limitations in the storage engine API. These situations require a license agreement necessary with the trademark holder of MySQL. The Oracle Corporation EU Statement released on December 14, 2009 has carefully worded in the statement about these OEM licenses and storage engine providers there will be no changes for 5 years.

One specific detail is missing, what happens then?

As an individual that uses, recommends, promotes and advises clients especially on various storage engine …

Lots of people writing about Snorkle again today ,Monty Says, help saving MySQL

He gives us different options, a , b or c .. but I , and some others, want an option d

No I don't trust Oracle, it's not like they have been a very good Open Source Citizen, yes they contribute to the kernel and other projects but my feeling says it's only because they have to (Kernel, Xen and others ) not because they Want to (thinking about Unfakable etc) , if they would really want to they probably would work with the CentOS community more etc, and as Monty mentions their InnoDB track record could be better.

But on the other hand I don't think the EU should block the deal because Monty wants his baby back , cheap , as honestly imvho that's what they really want, be able to buy MySQL back for a nice price, either beceause Oracle is being forced by the …

You’ve probably seen Monty’s post Help Saving MySQL. This is about

1. Development (will Oracle put significant effort into MySQL, actually innovating)
2. Brand (”MySQL” has a huge footprint), the trademark owner can enforce this – there have already been issues with companies offering MySQL related services via Google AdWords not being able to use the word MySQL in their ad text even though it was correctly used as an adjective.
3. Forking is fine, but still has to deal with the branding. For MySQL, that’s possibly the most significant issue of any OSS product ever encountered. You’re not competing against a company, but against an existing brand footprint that you (because of the trademark) have to steer clear of. So “just fork it” is not an easy or short term option, there’s more involved than …

From NY Post: Oracle Leader Blinks – Larry’s Olive Branch (to the EU), the NYpost sources apparently say that “what [...] Ellison is proposing is the creation of a firewall between MySQL and the rest of the combined company, and possibly setting up an entirely separate board for the MySQL business.”

There is no independent confirmation of any of this, so it may be true, or just air, or a trial balloon to see how other parties respond… I’m not going to add opinions to this, I just reckon it’s an interesting progression in the case. We’ll see how it pans out.

Update: so it’s not true (see Reuters).

(so now I’ll add my opinion…) Unfortunate in a way because from my perspective it …

Waiting for Godot
I read Waiting for Godot for HS, but I didn't expect to live it...

• E.U. Takes More Time to Review Oracle-Sun Deal

On …

The attendees were not satisfied with the first answer RMS gave to Brian, that Harish Pillay (Chief Technical Architect, Red Hat Singapore), chose to ask RMS what more he had to say, with regards to the letter he’d written. He answered quite candidly in this video, which Brian chimed in for as well.

The back channel for all this was Twitter… Don’t hesitate to follow @harishpillay, @brianaker, @piawaugh or even @webmink …

At foss.my 2009, Brian Aker asked Richard Stallman at his keynote, about the Oracle/Sun acquisition (with a focus on MySQL), with regards to the parallel licensing approach used by MySQL. Brian was referring to:

As only the original rights holder can sell commercial licenses, no new forked version of the code will have the ability to practice the parallel licensing approach, and will not easily generate the resources to support continued development of the MySQL platform.

from Richard’s Letter to the EC opposing Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL. Listen to the discussion between Brian and Richard.

…

In my recent post on the EU antitrust regulators' probe into the Oracle Sun merger I did not mention an important class of stakeholders: the MySQL-based special purpose database startups. By these I mean:

• 
  
• Kickfire
  
• Infobright
  
• Calpont
  
• ScaleDB
  

I think it's safe to say the first three are comparable in the sense that they are all analytical databases: they are designed for data warehousing and business intelligence applications. ScaleDB might be a good fit for those …

This is very relevant in the context of the EU probe of the Oracle-Sun takeover. MySQL’s share of the database market, which is usually measured by revenue, is of course peanuts and estimated range from half a percent to something slightly more. Peanuts.

This is not surprising, considering an estimated 999 out of every 1000 MySQL users does not pay Sun/MySQL anything (although some might be Open Query clients and while MySQL has been targeting higher-end clients and corresponding higher revenue, its pricing is still far lower than the premium-cost of Oracle, DB2 and the like.

All this proves very clearly something which I’ve been saying for years (do scan back in my blog , the definition of market share is borked when it comes to Open Source and low-end disruptors (MySQL has been both although it might no longer be a low-end disruptor, having overshot the needs of a significant chunk of its users). The market …

It appears that little MySQL has just become a disproportionally big player in the Oracle-Sun takeover deal…. article by Associated Press: EU probes Oracle’s bid to buy Sun notes:

EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said Thursday that regulators needed to examine the effect of a deal “when the world’s biggest proprietary database company proposes to take over the world’s leading open-source database company.”

Ah, Neelie Kroes. Dutch lady from the liberal (that’s seriously right-wing in NL, my American friends party, formerly minister for infrastructure in NL, long time ago.

So what can happen now? The EU can (and I’m skipping a few steps for brevity here) force the MySQL part of Sun to be auctioned separately, to allow the remainder of the detail to go through. One thing is fairly …