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By now you've certainly heard the news about Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems. But what does this mean for MySQL, which Sun has owned since 2008?

Let's look at some simple facts. Oracle is first and foremost a database company. A database which is sold and maintained by the company in a way that probably brings back memories of IBM in the sixties and seventies, for programmers who have been around that long. Oracle is not who you think of when you think about open source software (although they do own a few companies that produce some, namely the groups behind InnoDB and Berkeley DB).

No matter how you look at it, MySQL is a direct, and powerful, competitor to Oracle's flagship product, at least in terms of mindshare. As such, Oracle might want to strangle it. That'd be a difficult move, however; since MySQL is open source, it could be forked quite easily, with development continued under a different name. Or, Oracle could support it, developing improvements and turning them to the community. As the owners of the top two storage engines underneath MySQL, this would be an excellent opportunity for developers and users of the open-source database.

Honestly, though, I don't see much good for MySQL coming out of this. Oracle is more interested in producing big blocks of hardware and software with which to force their clients to become ever more reliant on Oracle's service in order to operate. Supporting MySQL wouldn't be in their best interests, since a client could turn to someone else for service, or developing a needed feature, etc. And that's why I predict that Oracle will probably try to kill it off.

Good luck, Ellison. MySQL project founder Michael Widenius has already mentioned on his blog that MySQL developers at Sun are planning to jump ship, that at least one has already contacted him to work as part of Widenius' Monty Program Ab venture. Widenius takes a more optimistic view to the purchase than I do, but it's evident that he's preparing for the worst.

Where do you stand on this? Is this the best thing that's happened to MySQL or the worst? What do you think Oracle will do to the popular open source product?