Discarding all the fuss made over the future of MySQL, Oracle clarified its plans to continue improving MySQL, and do it even better than Sun. Not only this, Edward Screven said, Oracle aims to improve many of MySQL features to make them compatible with Oracle apps.

Edward Screven, the chief corporate architect will now overlook the development of Open Source projects from the Oracles Open Source Software Division, like MySQL and OpenOffice.org. Screven has hopes of delivering complete, open and integrated systems and challenge IBM in this respect. IBM, before this deal was the largest and unchallenged Open Source Enterprise giant providing an overall experience.

One thing which is not clearly said yet is if the extensions made to MySQL will be made as an Open Source or a closed source project but the promise of a support will definitely benefit the MySQL developer community numbered at around 400.

At the same time, the argument of “There is no point in developing two softwares for the same task” seems valid as well. My best guess is, Oracle will slowly push out MySQL which had started entering the enterprise market and establish it’s position as a web based database server. This will keep the two softwares channeled to specific users and Oracle and MySQL will both improve only if they are better in their fields and do not collide.