Just like this time last year (I hope this isn't a perennial event) everybody is expressing fear, uncertainty and doubt about the future of MySQL in the wake of yet another acquisition. What is going to happen?

MySQL isn't going to disappear tomorrow. Or even in the next ten years. Why?

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• The internet runs on the LAMP stack. There is so much technological infrastructure dedicated to MySQL that anybody would be crazy to think that it is going to disappear anytime soon. Hell, lots of companies still run 4.0 databases.
  
• The MySQL codebase is GPL. Even if Oracle just closed up the MySQL office and set everybody packing the source code is ours to use, to repackage, to redistribute and to enhance. Drizzle already exists as a fork and others could emerge. I don't think that forks and alternative distributions are bad.
  
  So if MySQL isn't going to disappear, what is …