Oracle, maker of one of the largest proprietary database solutions, recently purchased Sun, who makes MySQL, a piece of open-source database software. Naturally, this sounds like trouble. One of the biggest database companies buys another of the largest?

If MySQL was closed-source, this would be much more of a concern, but since it is open-source, the immediate concern is almost nothing. Even if Oracle slowly tried to kill offf MySQL, it could still survive as a volunteer-based project, at least for some time.

It is very hard to know what is going to happen as a result of the Oracle deal, but I don’t think mySQL is at risk of any issues. MySQL’s open license protects it from being killed by Sun.