The story of MySQL’s ownership is a case study in what can happen when a free, widely-used piece of infrastructure gets bought by its largest commercial rival. On 16 January 2008, Sun Microsystems announced a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB for “approximately $1 billion in total consideration,” describing MySQL as a key part of the global web economy. The next year, Oracle, maker of the leading proprietary relational database, agreed to acquire Sun, which meant Oracle would also acquire MySQL.
That prospect alarmed MySQL co-creator Monty Widenius. In a December 2009 blog post titled “Help saving MySQL,” he warned that “Without your immediate help Oracle might get to own MySQL any day now,” and argued that Oracle had a financial incentive to keep MySQL weak: “A weak MySQL is worth about one billion dollars per year to Oracle… A strong MySQL could never generate enough income for Oracle that they would want to cannibalize their real cash cow.” He noted Oracle had not promised to keep all of MySQL under an open-source license or to develop it as an open-source project.
Widenius pursued two tracks. He had already started MariaDB as a community fork, and he openly acknowledged its limits, writing that “You can fork the GPL code, but not the business around it” and that an infrastructure GPL project can be slowly starved. In parallel, he campaigned publicly for users to petition the European Commission, whose regulators were reviewing the merger specifically because of MySQL’s role as a competitive constraint on Oracle’s database business.
The European Commission cleared the Oracle/Sun merger on 21 January 2010 (Case COMP/M.5529), after examining the evidence that MySQL exerted competitive pressure on Oracle and other proprietary database vendors, particularly in the web and small-business segments. The merger went ahead, MySQL became an Oracle product, and MariaDB went on to become the lasting community insurance policy that the “Save MySQL” campaign had argued was needed.