Oracle Acquires Innobase
Talk about a slightly frightening development… Oracle owning the InnoDB technology doesn’t hurt now but what about future development. When it comes to these large softare companies trying to play nice with open source… well forgive me if I’m none too trusting.
That said commercial giants really have contributed a lot to open source projects; multiple journaling file systems, database technologies, hardware drivers, application server platforms and more. These contributions have commercial interests behind them, no doubt. IBM wants a consolidated platform and Oracle wants to own a part of the pie in the up-and-comer in the database market especially if it has the potential of subverting Microsoft’s SQL Server market.
I guess this puts MySQL CEO, Marten Mickos’s recent comments on not intending to take on Oracle. Originally I figured he knew that with the continually expanding features developers would drive the demand but maybe he knew something we didn’t at the time.