Things are getting interesting. MPAB continues to drive away potential supporters with the tone of their messages, the inclusion of pointless assertions, and the complete lack of references.

• For example, Oracle could buy some companies developing PostgreSQL and target the core developers. Without the core developers working actively on PostgreSQL, the PostgreSQL project will be weakened tremendously and it could even die as ar result.
• Or another company could hire all of the core developers from one area of MySQL. I am glad that people have the opportunity to work elsewhere.
  
• MySQL is the database with the highest number of installed units in all markets (except in the high enterprise market where it has only a medium size unit share). 
• All markets or non-embedded markets? SQLite claims at least 500M deployments. Oracle claims there are 200M deployments of Berkeley DB. 
• MySQL is causing Oracle sales losses around 1 billion usd/year (in lost sales to MySQL and because of having to do heavy discounting when competing with MySQL). 
• Where does this number come from? 
• Oracle did not provide any remedies to the EC and the public promises they have published are just empty promises. 
• How do we know what Oracle has or has not promised? I am sure that Oracle can contact the EC without involving MPAB. Besides, I thought the hearings at the EC were private. I don't trust summaries of the hearings from anyone on either side of the issue. 
• The open source software it has acquired, like InnoDB, has after being acquired, been developed secretly and slowly which is against how things are done in the open source environment. 
• Compared to what? From my perspective neither Oracle/InnoDB nor Sun/MySQL have been great in this area. But so what? Both continue to improve their software and most people don't care whether or not the development process is open.
  
• MariaDB is an enhanced (faster, more features and less bugs) drop-in replacement of MySQL that is only available under GPL. 
• The GA release of MariaDB has no bugs because there is no GA release.
• The fork can't be used with other products that are using MySQL as a building block for their closed source applications.
• Yes, it can (thanks Sheeri)
• The fork has to work in an environment where no one has to pay for it.
• I will speculate that most of the money earned by MySQL is from customers who don't have to pay. People buy support contracts because the support product is excellent, not because they must.
• As long as the products are recognized to be competing, any solution that the EC would accept has to ensure that there is as much competition in the database field before the merger as after the merger.
• Is it that simple? Is competition a binary decision? 
• If MySQL were licensed under a permissive license, like BSD, then the users would benefit as they now can securely continue to use MySQL in all context. Monty Program Ab would also switch to only produce code under BSD for the MariaDB server, to ensure that also MariaDB can be used in all context. Monty Program Ab would benefit very little from of this; We cannot take money from selling BSD; We can only hope that there is a market demand for our skilled engineers.
• I would love for it to be BSD. Then I can form a company to build a custom version of it make people pay for that version. Your blog post cites EnterpriseDB for doing this. Why can't MPAB do the same?
• The companies that would benefit the most from BSD are the companies that enhance MySQL (storage engine vendors and companies providing extensions to MySQL) and companies that embed MySQL in their products, like Adobe or Cisco.
• How does saving storage engine vendors, Adobe and Cisco save the internet? This has nothing to do with the MySQL users you claim have something at risk. Storage engine vendors don't have thousands of customers. I assume app vendors who embed MySQL have more customers, but even in that case I fail to see how the internet is at risk.
  

The Oracle and MySQL RDBMS are very different products. This makes me happy. I used to work on the Oracle RDBMS. It has a lot of features that do amazing things. Unfortunately, this also makes it extremely hard to modify. MySQL doesn't have as many features. This makes it easier to modify. This also means there are a lot of things to fix in it when you care about high-performance and high-availability OLTP workloads.

But now we have a new story emerging from an independent source of news on the Oracle-Sun merger.

One more week won’t change the fact that MySQL competes fiercely with Oracle’s database products including its flagship ‘11g’ across all major market segments.

What does this mean besides a few more months of uncertainty for people at Sun/MySQL? Do they compete for customers? Or do they compete based on technology? We can only guess as the report is not public. I am sure it is a great document, at least that is what I have been told.

Can we get this done and return our focus to the roadmap for 5.4, 6.0 and the MySQL User Conference? I would much rather bicker about who doesn't get to present at the conference, the rate at which community patches are accepted and my inability to republish an edited version of MySQL docs. MySQL would otherwise be on a roll right now with the progress they have made on 5.1 (it is a great release) and with work in progress for future releases.

Update

Wow, maybe the GPL means something. Eben Moglen finds factual errors in the still-secret statement of objections.