So I guess the argument that Monty is putting forth is that MySQL's future depends on some company exploiting their ownership of the MySQL copyright. As in, he feels that MySQL future will fall apart if there isn't a company that makes its money by dual licensing MySQL under some proprietary license. Amazingly enough Stallman, chief hater of all things proprietary, agrees. Hell seems to have frozen over. I however humbly disagree. The MySQL community has already left the dual licensing model behind. Sun has never shipped the "best" MySQL version, the community has!

Obviously since many of the patches that make the community versions better have not been licensed to Sun, they can't of course apply these patches to their distro without leaving their proprietary customers in the dust. Of course I am sure many MySQL developers will jump ship now, unless they already did when Sun scooped them up. So there will probably not be a big big consulting company behind these community MySQL forks. But who cares really?

So option one Oracle pushes MySQL. This would of course mean a huge push for everyone using MySQL, forked or not .. GPLed or proprietary license. If Oracle doesn't, nothing changes for most of us. Those who are currently paying for that proprietary license will be miffed, but seeing how MySQL was struggling to convert OSS users, there can't be that many. And these people can now choose to use the GPL'ed version or switch to SQLite, Firebird or PostgreSQL. Again so what? Is this going to hurt the OSS community as an example of anything bad? No quite the opposite! Proprietary software has been bought and dumped since the forever. But MySQL would be a showcase how OSS protects you against big corps buying and killing their competition. So all is well.