Didn’t see this one coming. OTOH, I think the future is in open source, so this makes sense. Can they compete with the Oracle monster? Time will tell.
To compete with Oracle, you need to sell to big business. You can certainly make a good living selling to single users and smaller organizations, but this isn't Oracle's arena. The problem with MySQL is that it is not geared towards this kind of use. It is geared toward small to mid range systems with relatively simple needs (which does NOT mean that it cannot be scaled; Google scales a modified MySQL running on InnoDB storage engines, but Google is Google). Frankly, if I were gunning for Oracle, I would either try to see if I could get Postgres and speed it up or start from scratch. I just have a hard time picturing a SMJ (Solaris, MySQL and Java/JSP) or even LMJ (Linux, MySQL, and Java) becoming the next "big thing" in the IT world--and you know that Sun will try to push THEIR DBMS coupled with Java.