Oracle is Desperate: No Big Deal for MySQL Users
Oracle bought 2 companies which develop 2 open source storage engines that MySQL uses. Those storage engines are both transactional.
There's the possibility Oracle does the stupid (from a PR perspective) move of making those databases proprietary. But it's OPEN SOURCE right now. Which means that it'll branch.
Worst case scenario? The developing stops here, and InnoDB and BDB never get any more functional than they currently are.
The "bad" scenario? MySQL is a company. With hired staff. They pay the hired staff to get familiar with the source code for those engines and continue to develop them. Hence the branch.
The likely scenario? 1) Oracle tries to have a pluggable storage engine architecture like MySQL. Oracle Express or Lite or whatever would be free with those engines, pay with the original. 2) Oracle tries to go on the good partnership of "we support MySQL by developing their architecture, we're so nice, buy our product."
Really, everyone is worried over nothing. The whole point of open source is that it's open! Once you go open, you can close later on and people still have something to work with.
[...] I have had a few
[...] I have had a few people come to me and say “Did you see the announcement? How could MySQL do this? They’re forcing everyone that’s not a hobbyist to buy the product!!!!” Everyone predicted the end of InnoDB when Oracle bought it — I said “it’s no big deal” (see http://sheeri.net/archives/38). [...]
I think you are seriously
I think you are seriously over estimating MySQL's impact on Oracle. I do think it might happen that Oracle slowly guts their open source aquisitions.
But forking will not help MySQL's business in the mid to long run. They might still have to fork for a while to keep their customers happy, but a large chunk of them rely on the non GPL'ed variant, so a fork will not help them.
We might still see a community fork and MySQL might help to get this going, but they will not drop a lot of ressources into it. They need a solution they can dual license.