We’re used to seeing this kind of conversations between Eminem and Mariah Carey, but it seems that the Oracle-Sun deal has stirred up some opposite opinions between Oracle’s management and MySQL’s founder, Finnish developer Ulf Michael “Monty” Widenius. After launching a stern and stingy campaign against the Oracle-Sun merger in late October demanding some commitments from Oracle to the MySQL project, Mr. Widenius is now marking all of Oracle’s reassurances as “empty promises.”
For those who do not know what all of this is about, the whole public media war started when appalled MySQL developers were greeted one day with the news that the long discussed Oracle-Sun merger was approved by the US Government without any special conditions being imposed on Oracle to sustain MySQL going forward.
Fearing another drama like the one with InnoDB, the community started to mitigate for assurances from the commercial giant that it will keep MySQL opened to the open-source world as Sun did until now. Their last hopes were officially in the hands of the European Committee’s approving process.
After the public onslaught it took for the InnoDB acquisition and how the project was handled afterward, Oracle tried to speed up the approval process of the EC and rallied up some of its bi… (read more)