this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Some context for you:
Oracle has humorously called out RedHat for a recent broken promise to the open source community.
But, Oracle is best known in the Open Source community for their purchase of Sun Microsystems resulting in Sun's massively successful open source database MySQL going from the #1 database in use in the world to not even cracking the top ten.
Many factors contributed, but most notable was a sudden drop in servers available to serve the documentation and help pages for MySQL.
Oracle (coincidentally?) makes a great deal of money from their closed source Oracle Database. An inferior (in my opinion) direct competitor to MySQL.
It's entirely possible that Oracle did not buy Sun Microsystems with the sole intent to kill off the most popular open source database of all time.
For those who agree that Oracle might be totally innocent in that, I agree it's possible - and I have a bridge I would like to sell.
Oracle does acquire competitors just to kill them off. The only way you survive an acquisition is if you are a product that they do not have yet, and that they need you more than you need them.
Sure, but the choice is: can we not use Oracle and if the answer is yes, then they won't.
I understand what you're saying. I am a database engineer and have worked on several with the business model of taking customers away from Oracle/SQL server/DB2. But I wouldn't call our products competitors to those. Well, maybe SQL server but that's a different story. You can't really be competition if you can't serve the same customer base in terms of capabilities.
Also, whenever Oracle or DB2 actually wanted to keep a customer, they just made a low enough offer that made them attractive (remember they don't have a list price) and we'd be left standing. In fact, I'm pretty sure we were used several times just to get those two to make a better offer...
There is no comparison between the two. They don't even compete in the same market. Oracle is an enterprise level database with features MySQL doesn't even dream of yet, whether it is security, performance or just reliability alone. The problem with it is that the company is horrible and extorts people who actually have an use case which requires them to use oracle. They've built the infrastructure in such a way that one can't just buy a database and use it by themselves, they need to buy services form the company forever. And there isn't really a fixed price for those services. Oracle basically charges as much as it thinks the client can afford.
Sun bought MySQL in 2008. Oracle bought Sun in 2009, but not for MySQL, they just kinda got it as a package deal. The real target was java. There wasn't any plan to keep developing it and MySQL wasn't making enough money on its own to be able to fund it's own growth. There wasn't some plot from Oracle to kill off MySQL, they simply didn't bother with it.
And by the way, there is a non Oracle MySQL alternative called MariaDB.
I've migrated workloads off of Oracle onto MySQL. They are absolutely competing products.
We can both name 11 things Oracle can do that MySQL cannot, but it doesn't change the fact that many organizations chose between those two databases plenty of times before Oracle acquired Sun.
MariaDB was invested in at additional cost to the open source community after Oracle bought Sun. It's existence doesn't absolve Oracle of the path their ownership put MySQL on.
That's exactly what they claimed at the time, but the MySQL documentation became unusable within a couple months of the purchase.
Some of Oracle's advanced features were superior to MySQL but that doesn't change the fact that both tools could get most database jobs done in an expert's hands.
I suspect we can at least agree MySQL used to be a threat to Oracle on the usability and adoption side of the market. MySQL was the go-to option, before their help pages stopped loading.