[ale] It's official - Oracle has assimilated Sun

[David W. Millians]

Jeff Lightner wrote:
> It's NOT official just yet:
> Also there is the possibility the Justice Department will require them
> to spin off any product they are in competition with already.  (e.g.
> MySQL).  With the DB market share Oracle already has I'd like to think
> the current Justice Department will force that.

If this were last year, with the crew that allowed Macromedia and Adobe 
to merge, I would say fat chance.

However, given the fact that you could fork mysql anytime you wanted to- 
and some have recently- and the multitude of other free db choices that 
are out there, I don't see this happening even with the new crew. And 
the multitude of pay db choices, too. Really, when you think about it, 
the db market is one that has a fair amount of competition. Otherwise, 
why on earth did Sun pay what they did for mysql?

As the ars technica article suggests, it's probably best for Oracle to 
keep mysql around, and then make upgrading to Oracle painlessly easy.