MySQL Community Still Fighting Against Oracle

After MySQL founder, Monty Widenius, started an aggressive campaign against Oracle's bid to buy Sun, the community has shown considerable support and anted up the pace with a new pro-MySQL campaign: the HelpMySQL.org website. The site is entitled “Save MySQL” and was launched on December 28, quickly catching the eye of many developers, programmers and clients.

Immediately after its launch, the website rocketed through traffic ranks and even managed to enter the top 10,000 most accessed websites, stabilizing at the time of writing this article at around #88,000 (according to Alexa). Registered under a private name from eNom, the website comes to campaign for Mr. Widenius and MySQL's cause to ensure a legal and contractual way for the database's survival as an open-source project.

There is a petition on the website on which users can opt for three types of solutions (single or combined) to be proposed to the EU. These three proposed solutions are as follows:

1. “MySQL must be divested to a suitable third party that can continue to develop it under the GPL.”

2. “Oracle must commit to a linking exception for applications that use MySQL with the client libraries (for all programming languages), for plugins and libmysqld. MySQL itself remains licensed under the GPL.”

3. “Oracle must release all past and future versions of MySQL (until December 2012) under the Apache Software License 2.0 or similar permissive license so that developers of applications and derived versions (forks) have flexibility concerning the code.”

The website is available in 20 languages and has already been signed by 27,850 people. Real-time statistics can be viewed at this link. Until now, there is a visible trend to keep MySQL in its well-known state as a GPL project (the first proposal above).

The EU commission handling the Oracle-Sun merger is scheduled to meet this month to analyze and make a decision on the proposed deal. Many business experts have concluded that there's a high chance for the merger to go through as it is in its current state, with no special clauses being added to the contracts to protect MySQL.