Will Oracle discontinue MySQL?

[yellow_mongoose]

I've been worried about this, as I'm a MySQL user. With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems Oracle has control over two databases - the expensive Oracle RDBMS, and the free, open source MySQL database. If they're like any money-hungry business they will drop the free one in favor of the expensive one out of greed, which will affect millions of administrators and web developers. Can we trust Oracle to keep developing MySQL for the sake of websites like Wikipedia and Google? If not, will freelance developers still be able to develop it since it's under the GNU GPL? Also, if worse comes to worst, how difficult will shifting to another open source database like PostgreSQL be?

[ckeyrouz]

Personally I don't think that Oracle will stop the production of the MySQL database otherwise no one will work on the database since rare are the ones who can afford the price of Oracle.

Besides PostGre is a Sun product as well.
http://www.sun.com/software/products/postgresql/index.jsp

[Old Pedant]

I would suspect that there's a clause in the deal when Sun took over MySQL that if Sun (and now Oracle, as the parent of Sun) decided to drop the product than it will revert to the original owners. So it would just mean that the MySQL team would get ownership back and go looking for another buyer.

I do *NOT* know this for a fact, but it's a common feature of most corporate agreements. If the MySQL people weren't bright enough to put that in their contract...well, we all suffer. But consider: It *IS* open source, which means that it *can* be altered by other people. I doubt they could sell their alterations, as the open source agreement reads, but they could give them away. And if the alteration was nothing but (say) a minor bug fix...well, we'd still have free MySQL, wouldn't we?

All speculation, but I'd be pretty surprised if it's not correct.

[MattF]

Can't see as that would ever happen, but, if it's GPL code, it wouldn't matter a monkeys what they do. The code can be forked.