MySQL to become closed source?

[ryanhellyer]

An article on Slashdot has been raising a few eyebrows recently ...

... Sun has announced, and former CEO Marten Mickos has confirmed, that Sun will be close sourcing sections of the MySQL code base. Sun will begin with close sourcing the backup solutions to MySQL, and will continue with more advanced features. With Oracle owning Innodb, and it being GPL, does this mean that MySQL will be removing it to introduce these features? Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything."

I'm not convinced this is a bad thing though. They aren't claiming to be close sourcing anything which is already open sourced, they're just talking about creating new features which will be charged for, that's all. The existing MySQL will continue as per normal ... or am I missing something here?

I think of this kind of like Suns commercial version of OpenOffice.org which is essentially identical, but is available for sale and comes with free support and a few extras that the freebie version doesn't have. It hasn't affected the office suite, so I assume the database will not be affected either.

[coder4hire]

True, we can only hope that they don't close the source off to the community. We can also hope that they don't drop the MySQL ball, as many consider them to have done with Java.

[ryanhellyer]

Was Java ever under a free GPL like software license though? GPL'd stuff is a lot harder to close off than most other software licenses.