MySQL Journal on Ulitzer

MySQL creator Monty Widenius’ petition to stop Oracle from getting the MySQL open source database along with Sun Microsystems had collected more than 13,600 signatures on Sunday, the day before Widenius has promised to start circulating the results to “regulators, governmental bodies, parliaments and journalists.”

Widenius is also hoping to get regulators besides the European Commission investigating the proposed merger. He has refused to identify which regulators he means.

According to its self-imposed deadline the EC has until January 27 to decide whether to wave the deal through or not although Oracle has broadly hinted that it has the EC’s approval in its pocket.

Widenius claims Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL would be a conflict of interest and that the undertakings Oracle gave to the EC about MySQL a few weeks ago to nudge it into approval are “empty promises.”

The statistics on the petition’s web site Sunday, which are reportedly updated roughly every 10 minutes, claimed over 13,600 names, most of them individual MySQL developers or users and most of them calling for Oracle to be forced to divest MySQL to a third party for further development.

To get the deal through the EC vetting process, Oracle committed to spend more than $24 million a year for the next three years on MySQL R&D. Widenius claims Oracle will cheat.

One suspects Widenius, who is now working on a MySQL fork called MariaDB, is hoping Sun will be forced into an IP yard sale where he can buy the billion-dollar property back at 10 cents on the dollar.

The petition has also collected support for alternate remedies such as making Oracle commit to a linking exception for applications that use MySQL with the client libraries (for all programming languages) for plug-ins and libmysql or requiring Oracle to release all past and future versions of MySQL until December 2012 under the Apache Software License 2.0, which would benefit Widenius’ latest start-up.

See http://www.helpmysql.org/en/stats.