In a recent blog post, Help Keep the Internet Free, Monty Widenius makes the argument that the free existence LAMP stack is threatened by the eventual acquisition of MySQL by Oracle in the Sun/Oracle deal.   His reasoning stems from the position that there is no credible alternative for MySQL and Oracle will be an awful steward for the MySQL franchise.

There is much to debate about the many points Monty makes in this blog entry but one in particular deserves a mention here.

“Q:  Why can’t everyone just switch to PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL is a great database; I am friends with many of the PostgreSQL core developers.

The problems with PostgreSQL are:

• It’s not compatible with MySQL (different feature sets and different support by various applications) and it’s far from trivial (in many cases practically impossible) to convert MySQL applications to PostgreSQL and vice versa.
• It doesn’t have a single strong company backing that MySQL has to deliver high class support globally.
• The PostgreSQL market is also, as far as I know, dominated by EnterpriseDB that provides a closed source version of PostgreSQL, which is not good enough for companies standardizing on open source.

So for the Oracle/Sun/MySQL case, PostgreSQL is not an answer that would help approve the deal, the market share is too small.”

Needless to say we at EnterpriseDB could not disagree more with this point of view.

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