Re: Oracle purchases Sleepycat - is this the "other shoe"

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Leonard Soetedjo wrote:
>> On Wednesday 15 February 2006 01:38, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> merlyn(at)stonehenge(dot)com (Randal L. Schwartz) writes:
>>>> Oracle purchases Sleepycat. From what I understand, BerkeleyDB was the
>>>> "other" way that MySQL could have transactions if Oracle decided to
>>>> restrict InnoDB tables (after purchasing Innobase last year).
>>>>
>>>> Does this mean the other shoe has dropped for MySQL AB?
>>>
>>> The deal's not gone through yet, but it sure does look like they want to
>>> put a hammerlock on MySQL ...
>>
>> Is it possible that Oracle is trying to buy MySQL to kill off other open
>> source competitor, e.g. PostgreSQL? MySQL has a strong number of users and
>> therefore it is a good deal for Oracle to buy MySQL. Then by doing that,
>> Oracle will market MySQL as the low-end alternative to their own database to
>> give a full solution to the customer. And this would slow down the take up
>> rate for other database competitor.
>
> MySQL already has major funding. I don't see how it could get worse for
> us if Oracle bought them.

I think that Leonards point here is that if Oracle were to acquire them
and market MySQL as 'the low-end alternative', that they have a huge
marketing budget that they could bring to bear on this ... one that I
imagine makes MySQL's look like pocket change ...

Greatbridge had "major funding", and succeeded in burning it off in, what,
12 months?

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