French vendor offers to buy MySQL for one euro

French ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems vendor Nexedi offered Sun Microsystems to take over the MySQL development. The offered price is the symbolic 1€.

MySQL is the database engine used in most of the websites today. Fast, reliable, free, open source - has been the choice of website developers for the last decades. MySQL was originally developed by Sun Microsystems, but they were recently acquired by Oracle. Oracle is also a database engine vendor of the Oracle database - not so free enterprise solution, used primary is more demanding areas like banks or military applications.

The deal between Sun and Oracle is not completed yet but people fear the new owner will not take over the development of MySQL and abandon the project or turn it into enterprise solution. There has been a number of open letters to Oracle, Sun, governments, commissions and what not from both companies and end users to complain about the situation, but it has not been resolved yet.

If the deal between Oracle and Sun is approved, it will leave Nexedi and end-users in an uncertain place, according to a letter that company CEO Jean-Paul Smets sent to the E.U. Monday. 

"MySQL has become a liability to Nexedi. Our competitive advantage in the field of business applications has decreased because of the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle", Smets wrote .

"There are no competing open source relational databases which can match the performance of MySQL Cluster for very large data sets," Smets added. But Oracle's "poor track record" with past acquisitions means "the risk is very high that Oracle will destroy the value of MySQL and of its underlying open source technologies in order to promote its own proprietary technologies, both in the field [of] database and in the field of business applications," he wrote.

On Monday, Oracle sought to ease concerns about MySQL under its ownership by issuing a press release listing 10 "commitments" to the database. In general it says they will continue development and support of MySQL for the next five years, keeping it under GPL license. Not only but they promise to increase the spending on research and development.

However the future is uncertain and perhaps it is time for website developers to start looking into other database vendors - Postgres and etc.