Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was the expectation but the Oracle camp surprised everyone by actually giving it some attention, and meanwhile MariaDB's promise of being a "100% compatible drop-in replacement" came with more and more caveats with each release (as is to be entirely expected with any fork). When you consider the network effect of all the stacks already heavily invested in MySQL, all Oracle really needed to do was put in a modicu…
Anyone on the in-crowd who can share a bit about Oracle's motivations here? I recall a Bryan Cantrill talk about how Oracle is this completely amoral machine that just wants to make money, and how that drives their every decision [0]. Is this no longer the case? Or is it, and if so, how does improving MySQL and giving it away for free making Oracle money? Or was it always hyperbole and Oracle is improving MySQL becau…
In Bryan's defense, the lawnmower rant is pretty true- they are a simple company. They focus heavily on making money and abandoning things they aren't in a good position to do so from.
Selling per-cpu-core licenses and support contracts, great! Experimenting on or converting small projects into new markets? Not great. Fleshing out OpenSolaris into a product that could rival linux? Dead end.
Maybe it could have worked out, but the lawnmower didn't care about a product that had too few users to make money from. OTOH, even Facebook uses MySQL... All they need to do is invest enough to maintain market share to get support contracts.