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While officials at Oracle and Sun Microsystems continue to sweat it out while European Union regulators decide whether or not to bless this marriage on or before Jan. 27, the co-founder and creator of the open source database at the heart of the EU’s anti-competitive concerns, Monty Widenius, has launched an online petition in the hopes of saving MySQL from the clutches of Oracle.
Since launching the petition drive in late December, Widenius has garnered 16,883 confirmed sign-ups as of 11 a.m. Eastern on Jan. 4. Of the three suggested solutions offered to petition backers, 93.5% support MySQL being divested to a ‘suitable third-party that can continue to develop it under the GPL (general public license).’ Meanwhile, 60.2% of respondents (multiple responses allowed) believe Oracle must release all past and future versions of MySQL until Dec. 2012 under the Apache Software License 2.0 or a similar permissive license ‘so that developers of applications and derived versions (forks) have flexibility concerning the code.’
Another 58.7% of those who back the petition assert that Oracle ‘must commit to a linking exception for applications that use MySQL with the client libraries (for all programming languages), for plugins and libmysqld.’
A statistical breakdown of the petition shows that 49.0% of its backers are from EU member states while 21.8% of supporters are from the U.S. Meanwhile, 37.1% of the petition’s advocates identify themselves as an independent/self-employed software or Web developer using MySQL. 26.7% classify themselves as private users of MySQL while 24.8% are categorized as employees of organizations which use MySQL. Another 11.4% say they’re concerned about MySQL’s future ‘for some other reason.’
No doubt that Widenius’ petition will attract the attention of EC Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes and other EC decision-makers. With nearly 17,000 backers and counting, it’s tough to ignore.
But as blogger Dennis Byron has pointed out, Widenius and others would benefit from a MySQL divestiture since they are attempting to build a MySQL fork called MariaDB into a money-making business. In short, Widenius’ crusade isn’t completely altruistic.
In one of his blogs, Widenius states “We don’t expect to make a lot of money while doing this, but we hope to be able to ensure that MySQL can continue to live as an open source product for some extended time.’
Kroes has stated that she’s “optimistic that the case will have a satisfactory outcome, while ensuring that the transaction will not have an adverse impact on the effective competition in the European database market.”
We’ll know better in a few weeks what she means by this.
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