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I’ve been watching the hoo-hah over this with some bemusement. It was a bit
of a shock to hear that even Richard Stallman had lost faith in the ability
of his own GPL to keep MySQL free.

Seems like Eben Moglen (chief formulator of the GPL) is one of the few still
keeping a level head
<http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/florian-mueller-responds-eben-moglens-oraclesun-submission-536>.
Yet I’m surprised to see Monty Widenius, one of the original MySQL
developers, completely miss the point in his rebuttals above: Moglen was
clearly saying that _in spite_ of the unusual nature of the original MySQL
business model, the GPL still worked, not that MySQL wasn’t doing it right
to begin with.

To sum up: it doesn’t matter if Larry Ellison gains control of MySQL and
shuts it down. Since the source code is already open, it will fork, indeed,
it already has forked. Look what happened to XFree86 versus XOrg--**** off
the users, and they will go to whoever offers them better support. That’s
the freedom you get with Free Software.