[dba-Tech] Of great concern

This is of great concern for me.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137508/EC_opens_deeper_probe_of_Orac
le_Sun_merger?source=rss_bi

It is not so much that there will be limited access to options, though that
is a concern; it is that products like MySQL will not longer be a source of
innovation.

We all remember when Microsoft bought up FoxBase with it incredible search
engine. At the time FoxBase was the database of all small to medium
companies. FoxBase is gone, its technology stripped out for the use of other
fledgling databases like MS Access, its designers absorbed away to other
project like the then new DB MS SQL 6.x and finally under resourced and
marketed, it has faded away.

MySQL has grown in size and power and now is a challenger for many high
priced and corporate databases. It has also been a source of many brilliant
innovations from the very best minds of students, doing their thesis on data
structures to senior system architects implementing some design discovery,
each in turn adding a bit more to this system. In effect it has become a
global community database design project.

If Oracle, the epitome of a corporation, can resist the temptation to simply
absorb MySQL into its corporate environment that will be excellent but if
not it will be a sad day as Coorporations are rarely the creator of
innovation but only the sellers of it.

Jim