MoneyWatch Tech

Oracle Uses Pricing To Start the MySQL Retirement Party

By Erik Sherman

Updated on: November 4, 2010 / 6:52 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

Want to discourage people from buying something? Make it so expensive that they take a pass. And that's exactly what Oracle (ORCL) has begun to do with the open source database MySQL that has been a thorn in the side of for years: hike prices to make MySQL far less competitive than it has been.

This is the beginning of the end for MySQL. Once US and European regulators allowed Oracle to buy Sun Microsystems, which owned MySQL, the die was cast. Now that it has control, Oracle is perfectly happy to price the product out of competition with its main database systems and to let it wither and die. And there's probably little that can be done.

Sun used to offer an embedded database version for independent software vendors, resellers, and integrators to include in their products that ran on a client PC. The price was free, and it still is, but it no longer includes InnoDB, a transaction storage engine that business applications often find useful. When a company wants to license MySQL to run on a server, the low end pricing used to be $595. Now it's $2,000. Higher price levels that add additional features as well as support for servers with greater numbers of processors are $5,000 and $10,000.

This is the type of move that concerned many in the IT and software communities when Oracle first indicated its interest in Sun. Critics thought that Oracle would naturally want to sink the competitive product and leave its salespeople with a clearer field. "Oh, no!" Oracle protested. It has no interest in doing less than right by MySQL. Regulators, particularly in Europe, were eventually convinced.

Not that Sun had many options. Without Oracle, it had little chance for survival. But it does suggest that people who hoped that things would go along as before should now splash some cold water on their faces. It's part of Oracle's war against open source products that have not traditionally offered the same margins as regular software. This is a bottom line revenue decision, and you can't expect the company to spend energy on activities that don't deliver.

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Image: Flickr user Paul Keller, CC 2.0.