Can anyone stop Oracle?

A few weeks back, when IBM turned down Sun's offer to acquire them, I thought they were crazy. You would think they would at least try to block their main competitor, right? Wrong. Oracle have been busy doing some buying of their own of the last few years, gradually building up momentum, looking for a big name acquisition.

Image via CrunchBase

Then, they got one.

Weeks have passed, and it's still hard to say what the future will hold for Sun, and for Oracle. While in the past they have been pretty much steamrollering the smaller companies they've got their hands on, a company of the stature of Sun - who gave us Java and Solaris - requires different treatment. This should be an alliance, a meeting of minds.

However, what makes this approach even more interesting, is that Sun only recently acquired Oracle's greatest open source competitor, MySQL.

Image via CrunchBase

Now it's personal. Reading around on TheRegister and Slashdot, amongst other places, I'm getting a bit worried. I actually care about MySQL. I've been using it since I started to work with databases and especially since I started to develop web applications. It's default beep, sounding every time I type something stupid into it's command line, is music to my ears.

Where will things go from here? Who'll be next?