On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 04:27:50PM +1000, Arjen Lentz wrote:
[...] Oracle could cease operating the MySQL brand name or whatever. They could choose to no longer publish sources of future release versions. (there are a few permutations of each option)
Neither makes much sense on the business level, as it triggers other actions they cannot control. Right now they have a seat at the open source database table, and a strategic stake in that market. If they "stop", the user base is still there, and so are the active players. It wouldn't be a case of "oh dear we must now all use Oracle RDBMS" or anything like that.
True, making some overt action to make mysql proprietary or to try to kill it off would be counter-productive. It's the kind of thing that could trigger a mass exodus to either a fork of mysql or to a competing product like postgresql (and regardless of how they feel about mysql, Oracle definitely don't want people even thinking about switching to postgresql). OTOH they don't have to do anything, they just have to let things slide and not bother to release any significant updates to mysql. A moribund market leader wins by default (i.e. by the inertia of users), and doesn't scare the users away. A vague promise or a small code-update now and then could keep that going for many years, possibly a decade or more. User inertia is very powerful. People don't want to change how they do things (whether that change is an improvement or not), and they don't want to think that the time and effort they put into something was (or will be) wasted. As supporting evidence, i offer qmail. Amazingly enough there are still systems running it and even some people still installing it on new systems. It hasn't been updated since 2004 and even that was fairly minimal - it had been effectively dead for a few years before that. And, unlike mysql, qmail was never even a market leader...it hadn't had time to even begin to displace sendmail before postfix came along and ate its lunch (and sendmail's too). craig ps: <80 column lines, please. http://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #127: Sticky bits on disk.