Open Source, OpenWorld

A couple weeks past Oracle OpenWorld now and we are still awaiting some kind of word from the EU on the Oracle acquisition of Sun. Looking back to the conference, we saw HP participating in the keynote and various “third-party” vendors making announcements and exhibiting on the floor. As a friend of mine, representing a certain German applications company put it, “It’s very open here.”

That much is true and certainly to Oracle’s credit there exists a rich community of third-party vendors supplying options, alternatives and competing voices in the “Oracle market.” The “open ecosystem” approach is nothing if not a pragmatic one for enriching the solutions options for users while growing the overall level of involvement in the market by both users and vendors. And every so often, one of the third-party innovators is acquired and permanently absorbed into the Oracle DNA.

But speaking of “open,” we didn’t hear much about MySQL in San Francisco … understandable given EU concerns about its fate once acquired by Oracle. On the surface the European concern looks reasonable. But in reality, MySQL had a marginal upside in the enterprise on its own and, in our view, that’s why MySQL management shuffled the assets over to Sun in a lucrative-appearing asset sale in the first place.

Frankly, it’s just as likely that Oracle might find a useful role for MySQL in the Oracle “ecosystem” as not at this point. Why? Well, because in addition to IBM investing in open source EnterpriseDB, we have learned on Tuesday that Red Hat has weighed in with an investment in the company as well. It’s pretty clear that an open source database is going to be an option moving forward, whether it’s EnterpriseDB, MySQL, or both. For the EU, the operational adage today is that “new information has come to light.”

The question is whether the EU wants to see it, or recognize that the persistent high-stakes competitive game among the major IT players is likely to keep the open source database option viable. The real question remaining is whether enterprise users really care and whether the presumed cost-of-ownership advantages of the open source database model really hold up over the long haul.