mysqlforsaleYesterday Oracle announced that it is buying Sun. I learned Unix on a Sun Sparc workstation several years ago but at first it didn’t seem to have an impact on me (other than Oracle will now own the hardware as well) but then I thought … hmmm, Sun owns Open Office, MySQL, Java and other open source initiatives. What will happen to them? Will Oracle continue to develop and support it’s new open source holdings?

Back in 2004, Oracle bought PeopleSoft after a long struggle on PeopleSoft’s part to prevent the acquisition. A big concern for PeopleSoft users was that Oracle was going to stop supporting PeopleSoft’s enterprise resource planning software in favor of it’s own system. PeopleSoft has a very active user community that was very vocal about keeping the PeopleSoft system alive. In 2006, new versions of PeopleSoft’s Financial Management Solutions and Human Capital Management were released. Four years later, PeopleSoft is still alive and well.

PeopleSoft is a very expensive platform that is making Oracle money so it’s easy to see why they would choose to support it. But what about free, open source software? Why would they continue to support it?

Where this matters to the social media community is with regard to MySQL. If you are using WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and many other open source content management systems, it most likely has a MySQL database on the backend. As a matter of fact, it is likely that many of your favorite social media platforms have MySQL databases on the backend. MySQL is a direct competitor to Oracle’s database platform but since it’s open source, it’s free. Oracle’s database (that I admit I like) is very expensive with licensing costs ranging from $6,000-$23,000 per processor depending on the product. One can imagine how costly developing applications could be without MySQL. So that begs the question, what will Oracle do with the open source properties that it will acquire?

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