Given my experience with some of these takeovers in the past, there is reason for concern. Back in the 1990s I was a CompuServe customer. I moved from dialup to broadband in 1998, while living on the college's campus and getting their resnet hookup. I stuck with broadband since.
Anyhow, I did keep the CompuServe account for a couple years, and then there was the whole AO-Hell take over. In spite of all their rhetoric to keep the brands separate, maintain separate billing depts, and what not, this is not what happened. I started noticing the same billing oddities that AO-Hell customers had been reporting for ages, and when I canceled my subscription to CompuServe, the AO-Hell business practice of continuing to bill people for service canceled occurred. Had to go through my credit union, showing them the cancellation, the continued billing, and have them reverse the charges on my check card, as they had me fill out the paperwork for a fraudulent transaction against my account.
They said they would investigate, and if the charges were found to be legitimate, they'd be reinstated, otherwise they'd be kept off my account. About a year latter, AO-Hell contacted me complaining that they couldn't bill my Visa check card for services rendered through (the already canceled) CompuServe account, and asked me to provide alternative means of payment. Yeah right, I canceled, and ignored, never heard from them again. So much for the "we promise we'll keep these brands separate, you'll have the same support you had previously, yadda, yadda, we swear". I never had double billing and other such oddities before the merger, and after I saw time and again practices many AO-Hell customers had previously complained about for some time.
Now, on Oracle vs MySQL and other such databases; Oracle has a definite conflict of interest here. The free databases, though not offering some of the features of Oracle could be argued to take away from there market share. (Fewer people use Oracle, when they can use a free alternative.) The problem however is that Oracle is also pretty hefty in price, and given it's price tag, simply unreasonable for every business out there. There are many smaller businesses, who don't have $50,000 per year, was it for Oracle 9i? which was the then lattest when I took DBA 1, which incidentally was part of Oracle certification.
For a small mom and pop shop, or a business employing a handful of employees, this is simply unreasonable. What's more, a lot of the features present in a full blown Oracle database are not necessary, and the costs would eat away at their profits. Such small businesses would have a hard time functioning; so for them something such as MySQL is a perfect alternative, which would meet their business needs and costs much less to setup and maintain.
Organizations such as Google, Ebay, large scale financial institutions, and what not which can benefit from some of the features such as transaction rollback and commit, parallel servers, etc; then also have Oracle as an option, and the likes of the above named companies can well afford it; when the cost justification can be made to those respective businesses accounting dept. Should Oracle decide to take a route that would simply maximize their own profits, it could leave a part of the market space without an option more appropriate for their own needs/cost concerns.
