Strategies for SaaS, Cloud Computing, Governance and Sustainability

After 4 months of wrangling and hundreds of thousands of dollars in the lawyer’s kitty and finally the European Competition Committee seems to be closer than ever before to approving Oracle’s $7 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems. When all is said and done it will be a case of much ado about nothing.  Sans the posturing by both sides there is not much of real issue.

Although the initial rumblings about the deal were that Oracle would vacuum its competitors (read SAP, IBM) out of any influence they have on the Java Community Process (JCP) and thereby put them in a state of bother with all the investments they have made in Java. Slowly the discussion moved to MySQL and how Oracle would kill MySQL and/or stymie its growth by changing the license terms and force all the current license holders to move to its flagship Oracle database.

Oracle for its part has not been forthcoming as well. They initially took the done-it-once-can-do-it-again attitude to regulators – armed with the victory over US Department of Justice over the prolonged hostile takeover of PeopleSoft under its belt. Then there was the “Sun is loosing $100M a month while the deal is being unfairly delayed” quote. If it were really true that Sun lost $100M a month, by now, it should be down to its last few dollars.

The other players muddying the pot included HP and IBM who chimed with their hot gas about snatching Sun customers by the boat loads (Try as hard as I could, I did not find any mention of this surge in revenue in their respective financial statements. Wonder why?).

Born again open source protagonists Microsoft and SAP have been putting their hard earned revenue on lobbying against this deal. Google, Yahoo said to be two of the biggest users of MySQL seem to mind their own business and not get dragged into this non-issue.

Let us examine the key point of contention here.

Oracle would kill MySQL and forcing customers to move to Oracle database and thereby kill competition.

Anyone who knows Open Source knows that there is nothing like killing an open source product – even if they have the copyright. There are already many well known forks of MySQL. Amazon forking MySQL called RDS provide database in cloud makes a mockery of the argument EU is making around competition.

While MySQL does not directly compete with Oracle at the high end, it does provide a viable lower end option for Oracle to go low end where customers were either going with MySQL or MS-SQL. Instead of recognizing this opportunity publicly Oracle has been denying that MySQL was one of the key pieces of the acquisition. This denial is also feeding the speculations.

Now end seems to be in sight – and better sense seems to be prevailing. Both the parties it appears to have come closer to put an end to this sham.

This weekend we hear from EU that the Competition Committee might be more accepting of this deal based on the assurances given by Oracle. Here are the assurances given by Oracle.

1. Continued Availability of Storage Engine APIs. Oracle shall maintain and periodically enhance MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture to allow users the flexibility to choose from a portfolio of native and third party supplied storage engines.
2. As copyright holder, Oracle will change Sun’s current policy and shall not assert or threaten to assert against anyone that a third party vendor’s implementations of storage engines must be released under the GPL because they have implemented the application programming interfaces available as part of MySQL’s Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture.
3. License commitment. Upon termination of their current MySQL OEM Agreement, Oracle shall offer storage vendors who at present have a commercial license with Sun an extension of their Agreement on the same terms and conditions for a term not exceeding December 10, 2014.
4. Commitment to enhance MySQL in the future under the GPL.  Oracle shall continue to enhance MySQL and make subsequent versions of MySQL, including Version 6, available under the GPL.  Oracle will not release any new, enhanced version of MySQL Enterprise Edition without contemporaneously releasing a new, also enhanced version of MySQL Community Edition licensed under the GPL.  Oracle shall continue to make the source code of all versions of MySQL Community Edition publicly available at no charge.
5. Support not mandatory.  Customers will not be required to purchase support services from Oracle as a condition to obtaining a commercial license to MySQL.
6. Increase spending on MySQL research and development.  Oracle commits to make available appropriate funding for the MySQL continued development (GPL version and commercial version). During each of the next three years, Oracle will spend more on research and development (R&D) for the MySQL Global Business Unit than Sun spent in its most recent fiscal year (USD 24 million) preceding the closing of the transaction.
7. MySQL Customer Advisory Board.  No later than six months after the anniversary of the closing, Oracle will create and fund a customer advisory board, including in particular end users and embedded customers, to provide guidance and feedback on MySQL development priorities and other issues of importance to MySQL customers.
8. MySQL Storage Engine Vendor Advisory Board.  No later than six months after the anniversary of the closing, Oracle will create and fund a storage engine vendor advisory board, to provide guidance and feedback on MySQL development priorities and other issues of importance to MySQL storage engine vendors.
9. MySQL Reference Manual. Oracle will continue to maintain, update and make available for download at no charge a MySQL Reference Manual similar in quality to that currently made available by Sun.
10. Preserve Customer Choice for Support. Oracle will ensure that end-user and embedded customers paying for MySQL support subscriptions will be able to renew their subscriptions on an annual or multi-year basis, according to the customer’s preference.

Outside of 2) everything else seems to be what Oracle has all along been saying.

• Increased investment in MySQL like they did with Berkeley DB and InnoDB. Atleast the community can believe Oracle will know what needs to be done around DB unlike in case of Sun.
• Keep the support optional, storage engine choice – with fork did they have any control?
• Not sure how EU or anyone can enforce the Customer Advisory Board requirement compliance. Having one does not guarantee that all will be well – ask the participants in JCP.

So much for due diligence and anti-competitiveness. Not sure if anything more was achieved than it could have been the first day the deal was announced. Atleast the lawyers made some money in this down economic conditions.