Oracle has bought SUN and thus have purchased MySQL. As far as I can tell Oracle has two competitors: one is Microsoft SQL which I don’t like but it has good sales in the Enterprise market; the other is MySQL(a free widely used database). Over the last half decade MySQL has probably put a serious dent in the Oracle market. I used to advise clients to get Oracle for serious databases but for the last few years I have advised that people use MySQL for just about everything big or small. Companies like Facebook and Google use MySQL so there are few companies that have data needs greater than those two. So it seems the FTC is not complaining about this deal so that puts MySQL in the hands of a company that has no doubt had pictures of dolphins on their dartboards for some years (MySQL’s logo). MySQL might survive this process due to the nature of how open source as many of the original creators have taken off and done something called forking which is where they are able to take the source code and create their own version but while this could breath life back into an otherwise dead product it can also cause confusion among the users as slowly but surely the world ends up with multiple versions of what used to be a standardized product. This is the key advantage of any given database; it has its own quirks but as time goes by a community of users get used to those quirks and help each other out and knowing that database becomes a skill in and of itself. But if there are multiple versions of the same database that skill set loses value as it becomes smeared out over a larger and thinner set of databases.
Keeping all this in mind I suspect that one strategy that Oracle might employ would be to claim that they not only will continue to support MySQL but that they will even go further and support the various MySQL forks. Thus for a few million dollars in “support” they could buy the death of what is arguably their worst nightmare.
Even if the FTC were to intervene and insist that MySQL be separated from the SUN purchase Oracle could still kill MySQL with love by not only supporting MySQL with what looks like some serious cash but they could also saddle it with a serious number of SUN employees who were the same ones who chased away the talent who created MySQL in the last while. That strategy could be combined with the previously mentioned strategy of sending some love to each of the forks so that they basically all end up killing each other. In effect it would be like sending weapons to both sides in some foreign war along with sending them both some of your worst generals as advisers. If you are really lucky the generals are killed too.
The only possible strategy that the FTC or justice could employ would be to force Oracle to reconstitute MySQL as it was before SUN bought them. The key being that they get the key employees all back into their old positions. But this might be a humpty dumpty situation so that the only hope at this point is that one of the forks of MySQL becomes the de facto fork and thus the best realistic strategy would be for the FTC types to force Oracle to kill their entire MySQL department prevent them from any involvement with any fork of MySQL and allow the forks to fight it out until the Open Source user community finally picks a fork and then it would be the de facto revival of MySQL. The key being that other communities like RedHat pick up the new fork.
Anything else and all we might be left with is SQLLite and that would be dire. 