A group of MySQL stalwarts — Percona, PlanetScale, PingCAP, VillageSQL, Alibaba — has launched the OurSQL Foundation, with a stated goal of providing a transparent roadmap and collaborative governance for MySQL, which Oracle has owned since the Sun acquisition closed in 2009. They've invited Oracle to participate. The Register broke it this week.

The panel has seen this exact movie before. Oracle bought Sun, Monty Widenius forked MariaDB the same week, the Document Foundation formed the next year, Hudson became Jenkins, and Apache OpenOffice has been getting roughly two commits a year ever since. The community didn't keep Oracle honest the last three times. The community left. So the question the panel keeps circling isn't whether the foundation's members are serious people — they are — it's what they think is different sixteen years after  ...