"Around 70 members of the team behind the open source database have been shown the door as part of Oracle's latest round of redundancies, according to one high-level source in the MySQL community. Michael "Monty" Widenius, who co-authored the original MySQL in the 1990s, posted that he was "Heartbroken to hear about the widespread layoffs at MySQL last week, and while I'm not surprised that Oracle is going in this direction with MySQL, it still saddens me that it's come to this.""
"Although the early part of Oracle's management of MySQL has attracted praise, more recently, concerns have emerged over Big Red's continuing custodianship of the system. In 2024, Peter Zaitsev, who worked as a performance engineer at MySQL, said Oracle's MySQL development efforts had become swayed by Heatwave, a proprietary analytics database service based on MySQL. Community sources told The Register that Oracle's open source MySQL team has become part of the Heatwave unit, meanwhile Oracle is prioritizing resources on AI."
Oracle dismissed approximately 70 members of the core MySQL development team in a recent round of redundancies, including tenured engineers. The layoffs have raised immediate concern about the stability and future development of one of the most widely used open-source relational databases. Historical context includes MySQL's rise within the LAMP stack and acquisitions by Sun and Oracle. Sources report MySQL development has been integrated into Oracle's Heatwave unit as the company reallocates resources toward proprietary analytics and AI priorities. Former MySQL contributors expressed heartbreak and disappointment over the shift away from open-source stewardship.
Read at Theregister
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]