Re: [GENERAL] Oracle buys Innobase - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

We have entered a new phase in the possible attacks on PostgreSQL.

The purchase of InnoDB clearly shows Oracle is ready to expend money to
slow down competitive database technology.  Now that MySQL has been
attacked, we should expect to be the next target.

Let's assume Oracle is willing to spend 1% of their revenue or net
income on attacking PostgreSQL.  Given this financial statement:

    http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=ORCL&annual

that would be USD $20-100 million.  (The Oracle financial statement will
eventually disclose the purchase price of InnoDB, and we can use that as
a minimum amount they would be willing to spend.)

Now, I think Oracle realizes that the database will eventually become a
commodity based on their purchase of Peoplesoft and other application
technology.  However, every financial period they delay that time is
more profit for them, so it is a cost/benefit of how much it is worth to
slow down PostgreSQL.  Obviously they thought the InnoDB purchase was
worth it to slow down or control MySQL.  Our goal should be to make the
cost of attacks higher than the benefit.

Here are the three most likely attacks on our project:

o  Hiring

Oracle could hire a large portion of our paid or volunteer developers,
thereby slowing down the project.  Individuals would probably be
approach as "We like your work on PostgreSQL and would like your
expertise in improving Oracle", but of course once hired what they did
for Oracle would be unimportant.  What would be important is what they
_don't_ do for PostgreSQL.

o  Trademark

Marc Fournier owns the PostgreSQL trademark and domain names.  He could
be attacked, perhaps by hiring him to do a job, causing it to fail, then
suing him to obtain the trademark, and therefore the right to own the
domain names.  The trademark has not been enforced, and it would be hard
to enforce at this stage, but I think it would be effective in gaining
control of the domain names.

o  Patents

Most technology people agree the software patent system is broken, but
it could be a potent weapon against us, though we have shown we can
efficiently remove patent issue from our code.


There is probably nothing Oracle can do to permanently harm us, but
there are a variety of things they can do to temporarily slow us down,
and it is likely a attempt will be made in the future.  There are also
possible threats to PostgreSQL support companies, though they are
somewhat independent of the project.

--
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
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