With the open source community up in arms about Oracle's intentions, a new release and commitment to MySQL is met with skepticism but you have to look at the intentions

By Alan Shimel on Wed, 04/14/10

With the open source community seriously doubting Oracle's commitment to open source software, Oracle tried to smooth over some ruffled feathers by announcing a new release of MySQL Cluster server today.

At the announcement at the O'Reily MySQL conference,they also reaffirmed their commitment to continuing to develop MySQL to compete with Microsoft's SQL server. However, reading between the lines that doesn't meant they are reaffirming MySQL's open source features.

I am not a DB aspect but many of MySQL's advanced features like clustering required a commercial license. I would like to see Oracle say something specifically about what the open source version of MySQL will contain.

Evidently the attendees at the conference felt the same way and the Oracle announcement was met with a lukewarm response.

Of course one vendor's misery is another vendors glee. Roger Burkhardt, CEO of Ingres as part of their increasingly aggressive campaign against Oracle/MySQL had this to say,

“Oracle has already cut back the MySQL road map to avoid competing with its own database management system and will try and attract MySQL developers onto a path to costly proprietary software and vendor lock-in. MySQL lacks the enterprise grade strength and features required to actually run Oracle’s own applications in production and they won’t add these capabilities. They will use MySQL and Glass fish as open source “window dressing” to try and divert the threat from capable open source technologies such as Ingres and JBOSS, to their overpriced database and application server software."

Now keep in mind where this is coming from. Obviously Burkhardt has an ax to grind here and is anything but an impartial observer.  In fact I am somewhat amused when I see Ingres position themselves as the "leader" in open source and the thought leader here. But I guess if you repeat enough people will start believing it.

Anyway, in spite of Burkhardt's spin, I would be interested to see what is actually going to be open in MySQL before I condemn Oracle.