Mickos says that Oracle has also hinted that it will support MySQL, though he discounts any threat from Ellison. "One point of clarification: I never said that Oracle has threatened MySQL.

"Instead, I view it as a positive thing that Oracle distributes MySQL. I have often suggested that Oracle should distribute MySQL and I've made the same suggestion to Microsoft. Perhaps Oracle, Microsoft or IBM will provide support for MySQL and that could be good for open source in general. And note that Red Hat, HP and others already do so."

There was a time when Oracle was rumoured to be looking to buy MySQL. Nothing unusual in that, many proprietary software companies snuff out competition by buying up the opposition and then slowly grafting one product on to the other. Or, in some cases, discontinuing one product line altogether.

For some time now, there have been indications that MySQL's market position keeps Oracle chiefs awake at night. In 2005, Oracle bought the small Finnish software maker Innobase which provides a key piece of MySQL. Mickos told me some time back that his company's license to use Innboase was renewed by Oracle on the same terms it already had with Innobase.

With paid-up customers close to the 10,000-odd mark and an installed base of more than 10 million, MySQL is one open source success story. MySQL makes an open source version of the database and also sells a proprietary version. It is the most widely used open source database, far ahead of the next contender PostgreSQL. In fact, an acronym has been created solely to describe a vast number of websites which are based on what is called LAMP - the GNU/Linux operating system, the Apache web server, MySQL and the scripting language PHP.

Mickos doesn't want to annoy his much larger rival - that much is clear. Certainly not at a time when MySQL is thinking of going public. "If people want to buy support for MySQL from Oracle, that's great. And of course, if they want to buy it from us, we are fine with that also," he said.

{moscomment}

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