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 Originally Posted by kevster
MySQL is opensource too. I don't think it has any relationship with Oracle. Hey, I'm picking nits but if I can't do this for stuff that involves my regular day job, when can I?
I never knew it was opensource, I always thought it was a commercial product. There is apparently an Enterprise edition which is a pay product and has better support etc., but the standard edition is free and opensource.
As for the history it appears somewhat complicated but it used to belong to Sun MicroSystems and then Oracle bought Sun MicroSystems a short while ago. From Wiki...
Corporate backing history
In October 2005, Oracle Corporation acquired Innobase OY, the Finnish company that developed the third-party InnoDB storage engine that allows MySQL to provide such functionality as transactions and foreign keys. After the acquisition, an Oracle press release mentioned that the contracts that make the company's software available to MySQL AB would be due for renewal (and presumably renegotiation) some time in 2006.[37] During the MySQL Users Conference in April 2006, MySQL issued a press release that confirmed that MySQL and Innobase OY agreed to a "multi-year" extension of their licensing agreement.[38]
In February 2006, Oracle Corporation acquired Sleepycat Software,[39] makers of the Berkeley DB, a database engine providing the basis for another MySQL storage engine. This had little effect, as Berkeley DB was not widely used, and was deprecated (due to lack of use) in MySQL 5.1.12, a pre-GA release of MySQL 5.1 released in October 2006.[40]
In January 2008, Sun Microsystems bought MySQL for US$1 billion.[41]
In April 2009, Oracle Corporation entered into an agreement to purchase Sun Microsystems,[42] then owners of MySQL copyright and trademark. Sun's board of directors unanimously approved the deal, it was also approved by Sun's shareholders, and by the U.S. government on August 20, 2009.[43] On December 14, 2009, Oracle pledged to continue to enhance MySQL[44] as it had done for the previous four years. A movement against Oracle's acquisition of MySQL, to "Save MySQL"[45] from Oracle was started by one of the MySQL founders, Monty Widenius. The petition of 50,000+ developers and users called upon the European Commission to block approval of the acquisition. At the same time, several Free Software opinion leaders (including Eben Moglen, Pamela Jones of Groklaw, Jan Wildeboer and Carlo Piana, who also acted as co-counsel in the merger regulation procedure) advocated for the unconditional approval of the merger. As part of the negotiations with the European Commission, Oracle committed that MySQL server will continue to use the dual-licensing strategy long used by MySQL AB with commercial and GPL versions available until at least 2015. The Oracle acquisition was eventually unconditionally approved by the European Commission on January 21, 2010.[46] Meanwhile, Monty Widenius has released a GPL only fork, MariaDB. MariaDB is based on the same code base as MySQL server and strives to maintain compatibility with Oracle provided versions.[47]
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