MySQL

The IOUG takes a swipe at the European Commission

As tension builds in the standoff between Oracle and the European Commission (EC) over Oracle’s proposed ownership of MySQL, Redwood Shores has picked up the support of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG).

This is hardly a stunning development, although Chairman Ellison may find some comfort in knowing he has the backing of 20,000 database administrators, developers, architects, technical managers as he continues on his crusade.

Late last week the IOUG released a letter opposing the EC’s Statement of Objection, in which the EC made clear - again — what would happen to European users’ freedom of choice if Oracle controlled both its own dominant proprietary database and MySQL.

In the IOUG letter president Ian Abramson tried to make the case that by owning MySQL, Oracle would actually increase competition in the database market instead of limiting it. As evidence he pointed to Oracle’s staunch support of open standards along with how it has treated several open source technologies it has acquired over the past decade.

“Consistently, Oracle has demonstrated its intention to define standard approaches that are open to all, and the acquisition of MySQL is expected to be no different,” Abramson wrote. “Oracle has shown it is a company that supports open standards. We anticipate that Oracle will continue to foster innovation and openness with MySQL following the acquisition and not hinder competition.”

Underlining his point about how well Oracle is capable of working and playing well with others in the open source world, he cites several acquisitions the company has made and how well those technologies have done since including TimesTen, Berkeley DB and Hyperion’s Essbase.

Abramson added that should Oracle decide to “deviate” from this pattern of behavior of the way it has treated the technologies it has acquired, it is his belief the market would be quick to drive a whole new set of viable competitors into the open source world.

In the latest go round involving the EC’s Statement Of Objection to the Oracle-Sun deal, Ellison and the EC’s Neelie Kroes slapped each other around pretty good. Ellison gave the EC a backhander saying its objections were based on a “profound misunderstanding of how open source worked, and Kroes countered with a sharp left hook labeling Ellison’s criticism as “facile and superficial.”

Why is this battle over a free piece of software, which represents such a small part of the overall $7.4 billion deal growing increasingly contentious? Some good answers were given in a New York Times story that points out this case is helping surface the very different views of open source software.

First open source software is much more economically important to Europeans than it is to Americans. In the story Michael Cusumano, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management says the trans-Atlantic “megawar” makes sense in that “the Europeans come to the defense of open-source companies because the big proprietary companies are nearly all American.”

The story goes on to say European governments have looked at open source software as a “potential tool of economic development and independence.” For instance, according to the story, several major European countries actively encourage local and central governments to consider products like MySQL and Linux over proprietary platform such as Oracle databases and Microsoft’s Windows.

The EC is clearly considering what this decision might mean to the overall health of some European economies. It appears to be a much more important consideration to the EC than it was to the U.S. Department of Justice who approved the deal with not too much muss and fuss months ago.

So this battle could serve to resolve a much larger issue than what havoc Oracle might wreak among its competitors with a free database. It continues to be a crime that Sun employees lose their jobs as these two haggle over what this solution should be? If it goes badly for Oracle at the scheduled Nov. 25 meeting with the EC, and the latter formally blocks the deal by the Jan. 19 deadline, and if Oracle decides to take the EC through a protracted trial, there won’t enough of Sun left to make this worth Oracle’s while.

Bad week for Larry

Not the best of weeks for Team Oracle in or out of the water.

First came reports late Tuesday that the European Commission (EC) was nearing a decision to issue an official statement of objection over Oracle’s proposed bid to acquire Sun Microsystems. Issuing such a statement is largely considered the first step toward blocking the 47.4 billion deal.

As has been reported here and elsewhere over the past couple of months, the focus on the EC’s two-month long investigation continues to be on Oracle gaining possession of Sun’s MySQL, the market leading open source database. EC officials believe Oracle’s control over both the leading proprietary database and the leading open source database would significantly limit the buying choices of European users.

The EC reportedly is seriously considering issuing a statement of objection because Oracle has failed to get back to the organization with evidence that the proposed deal would not cripple competition after several requests.

The EC has not blocked mergers of this magnitude very often, but Larry seems to be testing their patience. No word yet whether Larry and his right hand woman, Safra Catz are on a plane heading to Brussels to better explain themselves.

The second bummer for Team Oracle this week is the 200-foot mast on the company’s gigantic trimaran, which is expected to represent the US the America’s Cup, snapped and came crashing down while sailing out in the Pacific ocean. The gigantic craft had to be towed back to its berth. Estimated cost of the boken mast, a whopping $10 million.

Is this an omen of some news that could be coming out of Brussels

Red Hat-EnterpriseDB deal could affect Oracle’s open source fortunes

With Red Hat making a $19 million investment in EnterpriseDB earlier this week, competition in the open source database market figures to get a little more interesting. While the European Commission (EC) and Oracle grapple over whether it is in the best interest of the market for the latter to take ownership of MySQL, Red Hat is clearly not waiting for that decision to make its move.

Red Hat officials hardly drew a detailed product roadmap for what they might do with Enterprise DB’s Postgres-based database (like putting together a software stack with Enterprise Linux, JBoss and KVM to go after Oracle at the low end perhaps) at this week’s announcement.  More importantly, Red Hat’s investment signals its belief that maybe the open source database market could be the next big opportunity in software.

A nice byproduct of the Red Hat-EnterpriseDB deal is if the EC does finally write off on the Oracle-MySQL deal, Oracle would have a legitimate competitor that could prevent it from completely dominating the open source database market. Not that the Red Hat-EnterpriseDB partnership would cause a mass migration away from MySQL either.

For now, officials from both companies see a good fit going forward. Enterprise DB has established itself as one of the leading supporters of PostgresSQL database, announcing in 2005 it planned to make proprietary products based on the product. Red Hat is hardly unfamiliar with Postgres as it has bundled the product with every copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for some time. Red Hat is also moving its Linux-based Network Satellite to PostgresSQL and away from Oracle.

Each company also shares the same view on how to sell its products. “EnterpriseDB is also working to create customer value through a subscription support model.  Clearly, this is a model we see as beneficial,” said Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat said earlier this week.

And if both companies eventually do put together a software stack that takes on Oracle, both Red Hat and EnterpriseDB, particularly the latter, would benefit from Red Hat’s larger sales organization and network of resellers.

If the EC forces Oracle to sell off MySQL in order for the Sun acquisition to be approved, the Red Hat-Enterprise DB deal could take on even larger significance.  Any third party that MySQL ends up in the hands of almost assuredly would be less powerful and influential than Oracle (I just can’t see IBM, Microsoft or SAP jumping in here because of either a lack of strategic interest or government intervention), meaning the newly formed partnership would have a better chance to grab market share.

If the EC rules against Oracle holding on to MySQL, the loser here could be Oracle. Redwood Shores would lose a golden opportunity to own one of the premiere products in the open source market - a market that figures to grow bigger not smaller over the next few years - as well as have its proprietary database business come under pressure from Red Hat and the new owners of MySQL.

Pressure builds for Oracle to sell MySQL

It seems like some people just don’t want Oracle to own MySQL.

Right on the heels of Oracle chairman Larry Ellison’s pledge to aggressively support Sun’s MySQL database at OpenWorld last week, Michael “Monty” Widenius, MySQL’s creator says Oracle should sell the open source database to a third party thereby resolving the antitrust concerns of the European Union (EU).

The EU’s objections are focused on Oracle, the leader in proprietary databases, gaining possession of MySQL, the leading open source database, and the competitive ramifications that sort of dominance will have on European markets.

In his blog Widenius wrote that MySQL needs a different home other than Oracle “where there would be no conflicts of interest concerning how, or if, MySQL should be developed further.”

Both Ellison and Sun co-founder Scott McNealy in their OpenWorld keynotes pointed to examples of Oracle’s track record when it comes to owning open source products, most notably the Sleepycat database. McNealy said he believes Ellison will carry through on his promise to bring MySQL greater success adding that the product represents no threat to Oracle’s flagship database and that it is a natural competitor to and an offering from a common enemy - Microsoft.

“MySQL is the leading open source, low-end database. Larry says it will not compete with Oracle or DB2 but with Microsoft so he has every reason to want it to succeed,” McNealy said.

Even Widenius’ former partner and co-founder of MySQL, Marten Mickos has contacted Nellie Kroes, the EU’s Competition Commissioner, advising her to approve the acquisition in the face of Sun’s dwindling market share and financial fortunes.

Ellison last month said Sun is losing some $100 million a month, and if the EU’s investigation goes all the way to the January 19 deadline, that could mean another $300 million in losses, along with God knows how many more points of lost market share to IBM and HP in the server hardware business. As I have said before, I don’t understand why the EU doesn’t understand there is little danger to limiting user choice or in Oracle trying to control pricing by approving the deal. I mean, there are no pricing issues — MySQL is free.

Just late yesterday Sun said it planned to cut 3,000 jobs over the next year, although some of those jobs could be related to redundancies with Oracle personnel as the company readies itself for the expected merger. Still, some of those layoffs have to be related to Sun’s poor performance since early this year.

The rub here is finding a “suitable” third party to take over ownership of MySQL. It certainly can’t be sold to IBM, SAP, Hewlett-Packard or any other major competitor of either Oracle or Sun without the strong objections of Mr. Ellison and certain government agencies.

Microsoft? They should be interested in the idea, since Oracle could well use MySQL to compete against SQL Server in the lower end markets. They could take a weapon out of Larry’s hands. But I doubt they are ready for such an aggressive move into the open source world.

Leading open source companies Red Hat and Novell would give serious consideration to buying it, but will they ever get the chance? Highly unlikely, but it’s an outside possibility.

Widenius, by the way, left MySQL a while ago to form his own company, Monty Program AB which is working on a branch of MySQL called MariaDB. I assume he doesn’t have any interest in marshaling an effort to take his old product back.

No, (and I can barely believe I am saying this) the best option here for everyone concerned is that the EU show some faith and trust that Oracle will do what it says it will do. If Oracle doesn’t follow through and abuses its monopoly position in the database market, Oracle will be the biggest loser because customers and their dollars will migrate to a more trustworthy competitor.

Ellison hopes the EU won’t Sunset his hardware business

Speaking at a dinner hosted by a non-profit group in San Jose last night, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison confirmed what we wrote earlier this month: The European Union’s investigation into the Oracle-Sun deal could slowly kill Sun’s competitive chances.

Well, maybe not so slowly. Ellison said Sun is losing some $100 million a month. This news comes less than a month after Sun reported a loss of $147 million for the August quarter.  Things are clearly getting worse.

Interviewed on stage, perhaps fittingly, by ex-Sun executive Ed Zander, Ellison said the longer the EU’s approval process takes, “the more money Sun is going to lose, and that’s not good for anybody. We want to get this (acquisition) done to save as many jobs as we can.”

Ellison did express confidence the EU will approve the deal, but obviously would like to see that approval way before the January 19, 2010 deadline. If indeed it takes that long, Oracle’s integrated hardware-software strategies will have to come from way back in the pack to catch IBM and Hewlett-Packard, both of whom have been successfully marauding Sun’s user base.

Nonetheless, Ellison said he is still intent on competing hard against IBM and HP, adding he has “no interest in the hardware business,” per se but has a “deep interest in the systems business.” This means Oracle will focus on very high performance systems, such as the Exadata 2 system it jointly rolled out with Sun last week, and not commodity level boxes.

Continuing on his roll, Ellison said he had no plans to sell off Sun’s popular open source database, MySQL, despite some of the reservations expressed by the EU. Earlier this month EU officials said Oracle having control over the leading proprietary database and the leading open source database could end up significantly limiting users’ choices in the database market.

Ellison shot back last night saying Oracle’s flagship database doesn’t compete with MySQL, asserting each product is sold to very different users. Oracle’s product is aimed at large corporations for mission critical applications while MySQL is for programmers who can download it for free and generally use it for Web-based applications. It is good to see Larry take a swing back at the EU for such lunacy.

And in another case of Larry being Larry, he couldn’t help himself from taking another swing at cloud computing. I thought he got past this, but he still hasn’t had his fill. Asked what sort of threat cloud computing presented to Oracle’s business, Ellison said there was nothing new about the idea, “that is was just water vapor, just a computer connected to a network.”

Come on now Larry, we know its semantics but look at what your competitors can do with just the right words and a huge marketing campaign.

In a somewhat surprising piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs in the audience, Ellison said they should think about pouring their money and energies into biotech and not IT. So one of the richest guys in the world, who made his fortune from IT, doesn’t think it offers the next generation any growth opportunities?

Larry the hardware guy sends IBM a message

It was less than a month ago that many Sun customers were concerned about Oracle’s silence on the future of Sun’s hardware.  But it looks like Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison has taken the first steps in breaking that silence.

While Ellison is usually known for his memorable quotes and speeches, this time he took a different approach for getting his point across.

Last Wednesday, Oracle ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal. The ad, which also ran on Oracle’s web site, lays out Oracle’s plans for Sun’s hardware and operating system, specifically SPARC and Solaris. The ad, which can be seen here, is aimed at Sun’s customers assuring them that Oracle will spend more money developing SPARC and Solaris than Sun has, have more than twice as many hardware specialists and dramatically improve the performance of Sun’s hardware.

But what’s missing from the ad?

As  Infoworld’s Savio Rodrigues points out,  Oracle fails to mention anything about MySQL. According to Rodrigues, this could be for a number of reasons — for example, it’s understandable Oracle makes no mention of any of Sun’s software products like MySQL or Java, since Oracle already has competing products in the software business.  But as Rodrigues says, isn’t Oracle concerned in making sure that Sun’s software customers feel protected?

Well, maybe not. At least in this case, the ad may be geared more toward IBM and its recent fight against Oracle than reassuring Sun customers.  According to Information Week, IBM has been trying to win Sun customers from Oracle by offering “Sun-set specials” for those who migrate to their Power hardware running AIX Unix.

But now Ellison seems determined to not let IBM profit off the uncertainty of Oracle’s future with Sun, especially as the uncertainty grew earlier this month when the European Commission prolonged its investigation of the deal.

Ellison had this to say at the end of the ad: “We’re in it to win it. IBM, we’re looking forward to competing with you in the hardware business.”

What do you think? Is this a sign that Oracle is going to start divulging more information to customers about the deal? Or is this simply an attack on IBM?

The EU fiddles while Sun burns

The European Union has always taken a tough stance against large American companies who look like they are on the verge of abusing their monopolistic positions. Oftentimes it has been tougher on such American companies than our own Department of Justice.

But the EU’s latest objection over the Oracle-Sun deal has little to do with being a watch dog ensuring fair competition and more to do with being an attack dog. We have to assume that EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes has nothing in particular against Sun Microsystems, but through this upcoming investigation she could do irreparable harm to the company as well as to the fortunes of the newly combined company.

Even before the proposed deal, Sun was a distant fourth behind IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell for server hardware market share. Since the April 20 announcement, Sun’s market share is in freefall as Sun customers freeze their buying decisions waiting to see what Oracle will do with its hardware business. Adding insult to injury IBM and HP have had a field day picking off Sun users through aggressive new pricing programs.

In late August, Sun suffered its fourth consecutive loss this time reporting it lost $147 million in its fiscal fourth quarter compared to a net gain of $88 million in the same quarter a year ago. The company’s revenues plummeted 31% in the fourth quarter to $2.36 billion. If the EU investigation goes on for even another quarter or all the way to its January 19 deadline - and some pundits believe it will - there will be very little left for Oracle to work with going into 2010.

With Sun’s server business shriveled to that of a second tier supplier, what does this do to the soup-to-nuts, integrated stack computing strategy Oracle executives have been yammering on about since last spring?  More than a few users I have talked to the last few months are now cozying up to the notion of an integrated hardware-software stack from Oracle. They point to the company’s Exadata Database Machine — Oracle databases optimized to run hand-in-glove with HP’s server hardware — saying the system far out distances the performance they get with databases they purchased separately. Can Oracle just walk away from that promise and still look good to users? I don’t see how.

And if Oracle is hoping to pawn Sun’s failing server business off to an IBM or HP after this EU mess gets straightened out in three, four or six months, they may face a fierce level of indifference.

In her statement last week Kroes made it clear one of the major reasons for the investigation is her concern over the world’s largest proprietary database maker taking over the world’s largest open source database. With one company owning all that database software, bad things most certainly are going to happen to database competitors in Europe and user choice will be nill, right?

Come on now, Neelie, this is open source we are talking about. No one can truly own and control a popular open source product like MySQL - it belongs to the community. The best Oracle can do is coordinate some of the development going on around the product. Most open source licenses demand that whatever you create must be thrown back in to the open source ocean for others to use and/or build on.

There should be no fear about MySQL being “Oraclized” taking the heart, soul and brain out of the product so it works better with Oracle’s proprietary products. If Larry’s boys do something like that non-Oracle shops don’t have to buy it. There will always be another version out in the community.

And one other thing: does Oracle’s proprietary database comes close to competing head-to-head with MySQL? Hardly, they are at opposite ends of the competitive spectrum.

So Neelie, for the competitive good of the industry, make this a quick investigation. Competitors are quite able to destroy each other and sometimes themselves - they don’t need any outside help.

Oracle should support the Open Database Alliance now

Ed Scannell

Oracle’s continued lack of public enthusiasm, let’s call it, about gaining possession over MySQL Server continues to puzzle me.

The folks at Redwood Shores certainly haven’t indicated they will abandon the popular open-source data base, but neither have they acknowledged what the strategic importance to its overall data base fortunes might be.

I know Oracle can’t offer up too many specifics about its plans for MySQL until its acquisition of Sun is complete (the latest speculation is that approval may not come now until at least September over some concerns expressed by the European Union). But it could do a better job of making a general statement or two about its potential value, which might go a long way towards making its customers using Oracle and MySQL databases side by side feel more assured.

The company shouldn’t wait too much longer to do that.

A couple of weeks ago, Monty Widenius, MySQL’s founder who left Sun before the Oracle deal, has formed an independent vendor-neutral consortium that will serve as a hub to create and maintain code and binaries, as well as offer training and technical support for MySQL.

The fledgling organization, called the Open Database Alliance, will supply a range of software and services for Widenius’ fork of the MySQL MariaDB version of the product. The group will not wait for Oracle’s endorsement or formal participation.

At the announcement of the Alliance Widenius expressed more than a little concern that MySQL’s development efforts could be set back years if Oracle either lets the product languish without regular updates, or lays off many of the product’s programmers at Sun once the deal is completed.

Widenius pledged to work closely with those MySQL developers at Sun, to prevent a significant forking of the code which would fracture an otherwise united development community. This, of course, could result in diluting the product’s competitive powers against Microsoft, or make it less attractive to Oracle shops as a departmental-level compliment to its higher-end databases.

Not just that. Some of Oracle’s database competitors could join the new consortium and make technical contributions to MySQL. It is hard to imagine that Oracle would be comfortable with that scenario having just paid over $7 billion for Sun.

Widenius also made it clear his new organization is quite open to any company or individuals joining in the group. Given there are only the two founding members who have joined - namely Monty Program Ab and Percona - new members are likely to have more than a little influence in the product’s direction.

I have already written about MySQL’s more obvious advantages to Oracle’s data base business: a strong lower-end compliment to Oracle’s proprietary line of data bases that could effectively compete against Microsoft; another source of maintenance revenues; and a way for Oracle to take a leadership position in the open source world and improve its credibility there.

No matter what Oracle’s longer range plans are for MySQL, the company would be wise to throw The Open Database Alliance a bone soon, letting it know it intends to work cooperatively. It would be good for not only MySQL users and developers, but for its own strategic good.