Oracle: 'We just don't care' about Sun-MySQL Merger'

Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect predicts the Sun-MySQL merger will have little impact on his company or on Linux.

In an interview with the Linux Foundation, Edward Screven, who reports directly to Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison, maintains Sun's patronage of its open source rival won't affect Oracle sales. MySQL is an open source database, while Oracle's database is not.

"We just don’t care," Screven said when asked by Linux Foundation Exec Director Jim Zemlin about the deal concluded earlier this year. "I mean, we don’t see MySQL very often, again, in competitive deals. It’s out there, but it’s not very often that a database sales rep comes back and says, "I had to compete for the business against MySQL.'"

Screven, who has been an Oracle employee since 1986, doesn't see it as a big win for Sun's open source vision or Linux. Both companies' databases run on Linux, Windows and Unix.

"I don’t really think Sun’s acquisition of MySQL has a lot of implications for Linux. I mean, certainly there are Linux deployments that exist because of MySQL and if Sun screws up MySQL, then of course that may mean fewer Linux deployments," Screven said. "But, you know, there are plenty of database choices on Linux, commercial and otherwise. I think Linux is much stronger than anything that Sun could possibly do to MySQL. "

Screven's comments were reportedly made in an interview conducted by the Linux Foundation as part of its Open Voices series. The webcast will be aired today. Excerpts of the interview were published in a transcript released to the media by the Linux Foundation last night.