Re: Oracle buys Innobase

On Sat, 8 Oct 2005, Mike Nolan wrote:

>> All of which seems to beg the question: why did not MySQL buy
>> Innobase themselves? As far as I've read, the terms of the
>> transaction were not disclosed. I guess it's possible that MySQL
>> didn't have the financial reach to pull off the deal.
>
> Maybe they didn't think it was necessary. In any event, they're far from
> the first (or last) company to underestmate the aggressive business tactics
> of Oracle, which isn't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
>
> My guess is that the people at Oracle looked at the number of ISPs who
> offer their customers MySQL database support and saw a market to tap.
> Oracle's tried to tap the 'small database server' market before, badly.
>
> If the folks at MySQL AB are smart, they may be considering selling out
> to Oracle too, before they get left out in the cold.
>
> Are there any lessons to be learned from this with regards to PostgreSQL?

IMHO, not really ... nobody *owes* the PostgreSQL code base, and we aren't
reliant on any third parties for key parts of the server, so Oracle would
essentially have to go after the commercial vendors themselves, and even
going after them wouldn't buy them *that* much, I wouldn't think ...

----
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