The issues are orthogonal. The GPL is a fine licence for many cases, however it’s use in dual-licencing schemes can be troubling. More on this in a moment.

The commission is concerned that Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL would lead to greater costs and less choice in the DBMS market. One of the key levers that Oracle has over the market is the exclusive right to control proprietary use of the database. BSD licensing would remove this lever and level the playing field. Oracle would still own trademarks, have the opportunity to retain talented Sun/MySQL staff, etc. It would balance the power that they acquired. Frankly, I’d be stunned if the commission did this. The suggestion is mostly in place as a way to help the commission think about the dynamics of the market.

As for the GPL being anti-FLOSS, I think that is stretching what I’ve said rather far. The restrictions of the GPL can work well when no party has an unfair advantage over the other. Take Linux as an example – many parties have a stake in the code base, but no single entity controls it.

In the case of MySQL, the dual licensing scheme gives the owner of MySQL financial incentive to encourage non-GPL extensions, to push customers away from GPL use and to not use other GPL-licensed code, for fear of losing its proprietary advantage.

I’m somewhat confused by your recommendation:

“…allow Oracle to acquire MySQL on the condition that the database, engines and documentation are released under a permissive open source licence…”

As it implies there is somehow something anti-OSS about the GPL license.

I’ve always understood the adoption of the GPL by MySQL to be our best attempt to capture the “quid pro quo” belief of the MySQL founders and ensure that what they open up does not become closed.

I’m glad to read that you find the (nearly) final version better than the draft. That is how things are supposed to work.

Thanks for the note on the mismatch. Points two and three blur together – I’ve modified a title to reflect this.

This letter is better than the first version, whether or not I agree with it. This letter has 3 points at the top and sections for the first 2 points. Where is the section for the third point?

Thanks for commenting!

The results of the benchmark aren’t important. The important bit is that a major IT publication saw fit to compare MySQL and Oracle quite some time ago, when they were much less similar.

As for Oracle having reasons to to right by MySQL, neither you or Mårten supported this point.

I do agree that most users have little risk and won’t care.

Cheers!
–zak

Thanks for commenting!

I agree with Mårten on any number of points. However, the assertion that Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL will help the market is over-the-top (unless Mårten is predicting that ownership of MySQL by Oracle will force the market to adopt solutions that they have better control of.)

However, I hope that I’ve stated this all clearly in the now finished letter.

But even if your evidence is strong, you claim there is significant competition between Oracle and MySQL and that was not the main point in Marten’s letter.

The points were:
1) Oracle has reasons to do right by MySQL
2) The majority of MySQL users/consumers don’t have much at risk.

The second point is the focus of Marten’s letter. GPL is fine for the majority of MySQL users, therefore a fork of MySQL is good enough for them. They may have to pay to support fork contrary to the current model.

Anyway, I think fueling this debate to give the EU reasons to block the acquisition will do more damage to MySQL users than any plans Larry might have.