"Having MySQL makes business sense for Oracle," former MySQL's former chief executive, Mårten Mickos (pictured), told an interviewer this week as Oracle, through its proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems for $7.4BN, positioned itself to become the next owner of MySQL. Mickos does not agree with industry pundits who say that Larry Ellison will kill MySQL.

"Larry Ellison is smart.," Mickos told an interviewer at Forbes.com "MySQL was getting around 70,000 downloads a day when I left. It's an amazing grip on young developers."

In Mickos's view, with an installed based of 11-12 million, MySQL will above all allow Ellison to compete with Microsoft, "his [Ellison's] favorite enemy" as Mickos puts it.



Mickos's overall verdict."They can kill the business. But I don't think they will."

Another open source, luminary, Wordpress creator Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress runs its operations on MySQL) is also unfazed. He had this to say in his blog:

"Today our servers are running various versions of MySQL, tomorrow they’ll be running the same thing, and if need be ten years from now they can run the exact some software. Because of the GPL every WordPress user in the world is protected — we’re not beholden to any one company, only to what works best for us. Today that’s MySQL, tomorrow that’s MySQL, a year from now we’ll see."