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Competing Claims
Muddying the waters in the case is the fact that there is no consensus on whether Oracle is a competitor to MySQL. Some analysts see Microsoft as MySQL’s main competitor, and rather than killing it, tend to see Oracle embracing MySQL as a weapon to use against Microsoft. As Reuters reported on November 10, 2009: “Analysts are betting that Oracle will likely heavily promote MySQL against Microsoft’s SQL Server, even if small businesses don't pay for the product, in a bid to discourage them from buying Microsoft's products.”
In the YouTube video of his interview with Ed Zander at the Churchill Club, Larry Ellison says: “MySQL and Oracle do not compete, at all….If you look at where we compete, who we compete against, we compete against DB2, we compete against Microsoft SQL Server, we compete against Sybase, we compete against Terradata, and Netezza. There’s long list of database machines and database software systems that we compete against. We never compete against MySQL. They’re both called databases, they address very different markets.”
MySQL creator Monty Widenius, however, disagrees. In a Reuters report on November 3, 2009, Widenius is quoted as saying, "The largest and the most common rival was Oracle. In every deal we were competing against Oracle.”
Also seeing Oracle as a MySQL competitor is MySQL guru Jeremy Zawodny, who on his blog on October 21, 2009, wrote: “Sadly, there's some background information that I should not publish here, but suffice it to say that Oracle was and probably still is threatened by MySQL. Their sales/marketing tactics made this quite clear long ago. But those deals were rarely public—for good reason.”
Says Zawodny: “I haven't yet seen anyone explain what motivation Oracle has for pouring resources into MySQL, especially if it eats away at their DBMS business on the low end.”
Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady sees it differently. On his redmonk.com blog on October 21, 2009, O’Grady says that, despite Zawadny’s “informed commentary,” he does “not believe that MySQL and Oracle compete on a material basis.” The truth is, says O’Grady, “that aside from the fact that they are both relational databases, MySQL and Oracle have little in common.”
O’Grady thinks Oracle’s aim is to use MySQL to take business away from Microsoft. “Given that Oracle has a negligible presence in the markets that Microsoft has been successful in,” he says, “I think they’ll be the primary target.”
Jeffrey Schwartz on visualstudiomagazine.com on April 22, 2009, however, voices a contrary opinion: “There is plenty of reason to believe Oracle would not want to in any way, shape or form let MySQL cannibalize the licensing revenues Oracle has enjoyed for so many years from its flagship proprietary database platform. There's the school of thought that Oracle doesn't walk the walk when it comes to open source.”
Schwartz quotes 451Group analyst Jay Lyman as saying, “While Oracle has displayed an ability to participate in and benefit from open source software, I think its expectations and aspirations for open source software are limited.”
Interestingly, Marten Mickos, who supports Oracle’s position, was described in a Forbes interview in February 2006, when he was MySQL’s CEO, as “Oracle's New Enemy.” Mickos in the interview characterizes Oracle as a MySQL competitor and describes how his company can beat Oracle. Says Mickos:
“Oracle has 50,000 employees. That’s 50,000 people waking up each day to work on Oracle products, and those 50,000 get paid by Oracle each day. We have 50,000 people download our software everyday and work to make it better. But we don’t pay them. Which model would you rather have?”
Moreover, Mickos is quoted as saying: “We have 300 people worldwide. Our team of engineers is one-twentieth the size of the big database vendors, and we can compete on most levels. They have 20 times the developers, but not 20 times the functionality.”
On Oracle acquiring the open-source Sleepycat database, Mickos is quoted as saying: “Oracle's free database is crippleware. There is a glass ceiling, so once you get to a certain level of people using the technology, Oracle moves you up to their database. We don’t limit our customers that way.”
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