Hi Anthony
I thought it was rather odd that they (Oracle) bought mysql to begin with...
Sun bought Mysql, then Oracle bought Sun.
Before Oracle bought Sun, 4 years earlier or so, they bought Innobase who developed the InnoDB engine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innobase http://www.innodb.com/company/
... so acquiring the rest of the commercial licensing rights makes sense from Oracle's perspective.
a) the acquisition of Innobase by Oracle earlier had zero impact (commercial, business, legal) impact on MySQL AB's business at the time. Sorry, can't give you details, but you can verify for yourself whether the landscape at the time changed. It didn't. There was (understandably) some apprehension with some corporates. b) as noted earlier, Oracle did not buy MySQL, they bought Sun Microsystems. To pretend that they spent all that dosh to get MySQL is ludicrous, it's not likely to have been even a consideration. To give such cred to MySQL is most flattering, but I don't think it'd be factual. The MySQL commercial operations (training/consulting, the enterprise subscription services, and that nasty dual licensing) do each generate significant revenue, it was and is a profitable operation. However, even at dozens of millions of $ a year, as part of Oracle Corp that's peanuts. From this perspective and various others (MySQL disrupts the "low end" of Oracle RDBMS market space), it would make most business and economic sense to spin it off into a separate company again. Regards, Arjen. -- Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com) MySQL services Sane business strategy explorations at http://upstarta.com.au Personal blog at http://lentz.com.au/blog/