…Like is LAMP now LAMOP?
I’m personally aware of over 40 projects here in flyover country that are not only leveraging — but are wholly reliant on — MySQL. To make matters worse (and admittedly selfish on my part) our company uses MySQL across all our web properties. To see that megalith Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems today for $7.4 billion sent chills down my spine and left me with a nasty taste of cottonmouth.
Sure, there are a few of those Oracle fanboys out there that will say this deal means Java will get more technical attention than it’s been paid for years. Still, I liken this acquisition to a story I saw in a documentary called Flow: For the Love of Water. A segment in this movie shows corporate giant Nestle setting up a bottling plant in Michigan and stealing away millions of gallons of water from a stream running through that community, putting it in bottles, and then selling it back to local residents.
It no secret that I’m a capitalist, and that I believe that money is the root of all that is productive. My problem with what Nestle did is that they took what was already free and a universal right – clean and fresh water – and sold that under the auspices of having actually produced something. I too fear this will be the case with Oracle and MySQL.
MySQL has over 10 million installations around the world and it is the productive man’s database management system. MySQL occurs naturally and freely in nature. People take it and turn it into something meaningful. It was provided under GPL and its current form represents the untold contributions and real-world use cases of thousands and thousands of people. Now are we to expect Oracle to come, bottle it up, and sell it back to us?
This transaction only happened today, so I don’t want to be too quick to jump to conclusions. That said, you would sure think that a guy as smart as Larry Ellison would have made a community statement to appease me. I mean gosh, this guy has all the water he could ever dream of and now I find him standing over MY WATER holding a big-ass straw in his hand.
What do you think?