Most of my clients are small enough that they do not (directly) use any products from Oracle. However, just about all of them use Sun Microsystems‘ Java development platform. Furthermore, just about every web site we’ve created in the last ten years has been driven by a MySQL database, and Sun bought MySQL last year.

While I was a bit concerned with Sun taking over MySQL, I am now very concerned with MySQL’s future. Oracle has never really been a big proponent of open source, and I could easily see them discontinuing or significantly cutting back on development of of this fine product.

Watch this space for developments that may affect small business users of MySQL in the future.