I think your friend can save his/her bandwidth because whatever happens to MySQL under Oracle, existing versions of MySQL cannot be retroactively changed to include non-opensource licenses. It is within their rights, however, to change the licenses of *future* MySQL releases. Secondly, as a major opensource product, MySQL binaries are distributed in far more places than from MySQL.com (for instance, most *nix users get theirs from their respective distribution repositories - Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu etc etc). Thirdly, as the digital world slowly moves to "big data", relational databases will slowly become obsolete (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL) - a very welcome development for anyone who has had to deal with *SQL clustering and replication. Saidi On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Al Kags <alkags@gmail.com> wrote:
but as a precaution am downloading everything opensource and keeping it in my small data centre for future use when people are acquired.