MySQL co-founder questions viability of MySQL fork to protect users

Thanks for your excellent analyse! A couple of comments: About: "it becomes difficult or impossible for large companies to acquire open-source assets" Open source vendors and their VC's has the same rights and restrictions as a closed source vendor when it comes to sell their assets to another company; Not more and not less. The issue at hand has nothing to with Open Source. The same problem would exist if MySQL would be a closed source product. The question is if we should allow a company to buy a product that competes with the companys main, very profitable, product when there is positive evidence that that the competition between the products has lead to greatly reduced prices in the market. One of the main securities for investors when it comes to invest into open source companies producing GPL software, is that the GPL gives the company a very tight control on any partners that works with them on the product and any companies that needs to distribute the product with their closed source software. If investors would belive that it would be trivial for another company to fork a product and take over the business, there would be very little investment happening in Open Source. GPL is thus a protection for the investment and things are good for the users when the company that holds the copyright holder benefits from keeping the product alive. This has made GPL one of the most attractive licenses when doing business in Open Source. The back side is that if the copyright holder would benefit from killing the product, then the GPL will help them do that. With no way to license the code or do closed source addons, there will be much less interest for commercial entities to work on the project. It's extremely hard to fork a GPL project, as there is very limited ways to make enough money on it to be able to develop it. Over time, the project will be taken over by another project with allows commercial partners to participate. In other words, for a GPL product like MySQL, the ability for fork the code is not enough protection to ensure that someone else will be able to afford to take up the pieces and afford to develop the product forward in a pace the that market require. It's easy to set up another support offering around a GPL product; Creating a separate development line is much harder, in many cases impossible as the options to make money are very limited.