Re: Oracle purchases Sleepycat - is this the "other shoe"

[Steve Manes <smanes@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Leonard Soetedjo wrote:
> Is it possible that Oracle is trying to buy MySQL to kill off other open 
> source competitor, e.g. PostgreSQL?  MySQL has a strong number of users and 
> therefore it is a good deal for Oracle to buy MySQL.  Then by doing that, 
> Oracle will market MySQL as the low-end alternative to their own database to 
> give a full solution to the customer.  And this would slow down the take up 
> rate for other database competitor.

If Oracle rebuilt MySQL to provide a seamless, plug-compatible migration 
upgrade to Oracle this might be a successful marketing strategy.  But if 
a customer had to rebuild his database layer to move up to Oracle from 
MySQL, as he currently does, what would be the incentive to use MySQL 
over PG?

I suspect that Oracle needs to burn cash and what better way to spend it 
than to expand its influence horizontally across its own marketing 
space? That juice could come in handy a couple of years down the road.