Greetings from the Oracle/MySQL Conference

April 21st, 2009 by Julia Lim

I don’t know why but the MySQL User’s Conference always hits just when big news hits for the company. Last year, it was Sun buying MySQL. The future seemed bright – what could MySQL do with bigger pockets and a company seemingly focused on encouraging the open source route to market? Then Sun tanked and rumors of IBM snapping up the company surfaced. Sun was supposedly being shopped around for months, but the IBM/Sun deal started to go sour. And then came Oracle, snatching up Sun (and MySQL) for $9.50 per share in cash – a transaction valued at around $7.4 billion.

Just in time for this year’s MySQL User Conference. (My goodness – I’m not sure how they will be able to top these next year – if they even have a conference!) ScienceLogic – represented by Messieurs Flip McFadden and Dave Barker – was slated to present in a conference session (on Data Smoothing) and participate in the MySQL Customer Advisory board again. As I write, Flip is about to head into his session – which I’m sure will be fabulous – but I wanted to pass on the buzz at the conference about the Oracle/Sun deal and what it means for MySQL. Here’s the skinny passed on by Dave Barker:

Oracle bought Sun and the Official Line is that this is a good thing (maybe).  Sun has been focusing on open source projects; Oracle has shown their willingness to support open source. An example was how Oracle worked their Eclipse license to work with GPL.

Word in the street:  Right before the show started, MySQL folks were concerned about how Sun was affecting/changing MySQL corporate culture (described as like a family).  The next day, they learned about the Oracle purchase of Sun, and of course these concerns increased.  There’s a lot of talk about how Falcon is doomed, and the Falcon PM seemed really distracted during his presentation during the Customer Advisory Board meeting.

More on the buzz as we hear it. But I’m sure the story will turn into a saga with many many chapters.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Related Posts

• No Related Post

Add comment