Oracle rejects request to relinquish control of MySQL

“On the one hand, tighter Oracle control could increase demand for truly open source MySQL alternatives, as users seeking enterprise features with MySQL compatibility may turn to distributions like Percona,” Jain said.

“On the other hand, fork vendors face growing upstream maintenance burdens if Oracle diverges further or slows the release of GPL code, forcing them to invest more in backporting fixes or develop core features themselves,” Jain added.

And if Oracle doesn’t meet its promised commitments, the Community Edition of MySQL will continue to lose relevance to PostgreSQL – so much so that vendors like Percona may eventually need to expand support for PostgreSQL and position themselves as database-agnostic experts to hedge against fragmentation in the MySQL ecosystem, Jain said.