In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database. If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project.

Obviously, MySQL users and supporters will have an interest in seeing that Oracle is not able to exert its full influence over MySQL, leaving customers at their mercy, since MySQL has become such a major competitor to Oracle. No surprise that there’s now an online petition campaign to  Save MySQL!