Monday through Wednesday this week Oracle hosted nearly 200 community leaders from across the globe to talk about their communities, the products and interactions with Oracle. This year was the first year the communities from Oracle’s Sun acquisition were included.
I was traveling with the well connected IOUG [Independent Oracle Users Group] and representing the MySQL Council. In this capacity, I had the opportunity to speak with Luke Kowalski – VP, Corporate Architecture Group; Roseanne Park – Senior Director, Customer Support, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle VM and MySQL about MySQL and what the Oracle acquisition means for the product and the community. It was reassuring to hear a consistent message that MySQL brings Oracle a new market segment. Everyone I spoke with was excited about the addition to the product portfolio and the opportunities that MySQL offers Oracle.
My conversation with Roseanne was particularly interesting as she comes from a linux kernel development background well before Oracle and recognizes and speaks the tribal language of OpenSource while balancing the corporate responsibilities of Oracle. I did take just a moment to ask her if Oracle requires that staff members check their souls at the door. But, my snark was clearly unwarranted as our conversation progressed to how the MySQL community can help shape the MySQL server and associated product paths as well as support offerings.
Oracle is additionally bringing a new market segment to the MySQL community. The secreted away MySQL instances in larger enterprise organizations are now legitimized by the Oracle acquisition. Oracle wins by being able to offer support to any MySQL organization that is comforted by a support contract and the community continues to grow its install base across the enterprise while still seeing the startup-y, nimble and frugal smaller companies adopting the free versions of the MySQL server. Far from scuppering the community releases of MySQL, Oracle has done what Sun was unable to do during it’s short stewardship of MySQL. It has released a GA version.
While there is little public summary information about what is planned for the next release cycles of MySQL, there are still commits being documented against the codebase at forge.mysql.com and bugs being assigned to future releases and developers.
After three days at the Oracle campus, I’m pleasantly surprised to say I’m hopeful.
Related posts:
- Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, and Drizzle. oh my.
- Oracle also acquires MySQL… right?
- MySQL Editions and Support- what do I get with community?
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