lammert - 4:40 am on Apr 21, 2009 (gmt 0)

They can't touch the current open source versions of MySQL, but they have the right to stop their development of these versions anytime and only put development effort in commercial versions.

Because of the high complexity of relational database systems, I wouldn't trust a community to pick up the further development of the open source part of MySQL at the same level as the current development has been. Without a full-time highly committed development staff, the open source portion of MySQL effectively dies IMHO once Oracle decides to stop putting effort in it.