Oracle's absorption of Sun is complete. Now that the European Commission has blessed the merger, the Oracle logo is proudly displayed to anyone who types "sun.com" into a browser. Yet if you visit mysql.com, you'll see hardly any mention of Sun, the company that purchased MySQL for $1 billion in 2008, and Oracle's logo is buried deep at the bottom of the pages.

It's almost as if the endless legal briefs, the hearings, the saber rattling, and the hand-wringing never happened. For the moment, database administrators, IT managers, and tiny Website operators everywhere continue with business as usual, leaving MySQL running on the servers and fielding the queries that come in. Yet, now that Oracle holds the keys to the MySQL copyright, the question remains: What does the future hold for the popular open source database - and the organizations that rely on it?

The question is a tricky one, and the answer depends heavily on MySQL's role in a business, the type of license used, the amount an organization wants to spend, what it wants to purchase, and who they plan to work with in the future. To further complicate matters, MySQL is one of the most prominent open source projects and businesses in the world, so any discussion about MySQL becomes proxy for a debate about open source licenses such as the GPL (GNU Public License).

MySQL, Today And Tomorrow

There's good news for fans of MySQL: It won't be left to wither and die any time soon. Oracle has made very public assurances that it will spend more on developing the database than Sun ever did, at least for the next three years. The Community Edition will continue to see improvements, which will be released under the GPL at no charge with all of the source code.

But, assurances such as these aren't enough to calm everyone's nerves. The very fact that MySQL's Website is so distinct may be more than an oversight. Oracle executives know just how tumultuous the journey has been for MySQL and marching right in and redirecting mysql.com to oracle.com would upset people who are still brooding after the purchase of Sun.

Your License Or Mine?

Organizations and developers aren't simply concerned about the future of MySQL as a product, but more on how Oracle's possession of the database - and its copyrights - will affect licensing.

Monty Widenius, one of the original founders of MySQL, has been one of the most public opponents of the Sun-Oracle merger. He left Sun in 2009 to start up MariaDB, a new version of the MySQL source code.

Widenius lobbied the European Commission to prevent the merger, arguing that it would be bad for Europe and society in general to let Oracle gain control of the copyrights to MySQL. Yet if Oracle were to become the sole copyright holder, he argued, no competition would be permitted to sell commercial licenses.

The trouble with forcing a customer to embrace the GPL is that it's an arguably confusing license, the details of which can grow fairly complex. Others argue that the idea is overreaching.

The Road Ahead

A Kinder, Gentler GPL

There's reason to believe that the fear of the GPL is dissipating. "Pretty soon, selling people on the idea that the GPL is scary and 'You should pay us not to hex you with it' is not going to be a durable business model," said Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor who often helped Richard Stallman draft versions of the GPL.

In the past, Moglen worked for both Oracle and MySQL to help them understand and define the role of the GPL in business. When the European Commission debated the merger, Moglen came to the conclusion that the marriage of the two companies would not damage the openness of the source code, the most important factor in his mind and the real focus of the GPL.

Welcome To Oracle's World

Oracle's control of the MySQL copyright and its ability to grant commercial licenses to users will also keep many customers in its orbit, if only because paying a few thousand dollars for a commercial license is cheaper than hiring a lawyer to decide whether you are complying with the GPL.  Some companies will have little choice but to smile and be kind to the Oracle salesman. A number of software companies build their packages around MySQL and ship the two as an integrated tool. They'll need to continue purchasing commercial licenses if they want to bundle MySQL with the code that they write.

There's NoSQL Like MySQL

Oracle must be savvy enough to recognize that there are limits to what it can demand before customers start rewriting their code. Many customers are slowly moving towards Cassandra, a simple, fast database without many of the more sophisticated protections such as transactions. There are a wide variety of other projects like Cassandra, all of them often defined by the buzzword "NoSQL."

Yet embracing NoSQL comes at a cost: "It's clear that NoSQL has its place, but it's not for the average developer as NoSQL can give you more performance in one area at the cost of less flexibility and interoperability in a lot of other areas," said Widenius. "They remind me of the numerous databases that existed before MySQL was created. When MySQL got popular it killed of many of these as MySQL, thanks to the SQL interface, was so much easier to use and interface with other applications."

At the same time, today's NoSQL databases are reminiscent of what MySQL was like once upon a time. The database began in the same niche as Cassandra, offering very fast storage by forgoing some of the belts-and-suspenders protections of the most traditional databases. Over the years, MySQL added many of these features, building a successful tool that could handle some of the more sophisticated chores, all jobs that required more engineers and bigger budgets.