A commenter says that no fork will be able to offer a dual license, and that a fork is only for the GPL portion of the license. Even so, what's the big deal there? Any sizable company can offer to sell a support contract for an open source license of the DB. What am I missing here?
An open-source project is more than the code. It also includes the community and the resources for continuing development. Although the code is under the GPL, Sun (and now possibly Oracle) has control of the brand and many of the potential revenue streams. A fork would lack the benefit of a clear, centralized community and many resources to fund development. Both of these things threaten the future of MySQL as an open-source project.
I can guarantee that for the $1Bn Sun's shareholder's paid him for it - 14% of the total price Oracle is paying for <i>all of Sun</i> - Monty could buy MySQL back from Oracle and do with it as he pleased. So why doesn't he?
This is the perfect example of why I will continue to hedge my bets on permissively-licensed open source (X/MIT/BSD).<p>Postgres and SQL are great products and should fill any gaps should you consider switching from MySQL (or Oracle).