Although Oracle's ownership of Sun and MySQL is a controversial topic in the open source world, there is reason for hope. Oracle's ownership, at least at first glance, is less worrisome than Sun's, says MySQL user Matthew Abarbanel, director of technical operations at IODA in San Francisco, a digital music distributor for independent music labels.

"At least Oracle's core competency as a company is databases," he says.

Sun, long a financially unstable company, seemed to encourage MySQL users to run the database on Sun's proprietary hardware, file system, and operating system, rather than taking a technology-agnostic approach, Abarbanel says.

"There's a bit of concern because it's unclear how MySQL fits into the larger Oracle landscape," Abarbanel acknowledges. But he adds that Oracle's ownership of MySQL "makes a lot more sense than Sun. At this point, it's probably the best chance of survival for MySQL as a platform."

Still, some raise questions about putting an open source database under the control of a proprietary software vendor . Karen Tegan Padir, who was vice president of MySQL and software infrastructure at Sun, left the company after the Oracle acquisition in part because of concerns about Oracle's commitment to open source. She is now vice president of products and marketing at EnterpriseDB, where she will be working on an open source PostgreSQL database.