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.<div>

<br></div><div>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).<br>

<br></div><div>Thirdly, as the digital world slowly moves to  &quot;big data&quot;, relational databases will slowly become obsolete (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL</a>) - a very welcome development for anyone who has had to deal with *SQL clustering and replication.</div>

<div><br></div><div>Saidi</div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 4:26 AM, Al Kags <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:alkags@gmail.com">alkags@gmail.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">

but as a precaution am downloading everything opensource and keeping it in my small data centre for future use when people are acquired.</blockquote></div><br></div>