Oracle to buy Sun (owner of mySQL)

Nothing will happen to MySQL. There are already free community and paid premium flavours of MySQL, so there's not a lot else Oracle could do in the short term.

If anything, the trend has been for companies to offer a lightweight, free version of their database system - namely Oracle, and Microsoft with their SQL Server Express Editions.

It could be speculated that Oracle and MySQL merge, with MySQL being the lightweight, free offering - but they're quite different database packages, so it's difficult to see what will happen.

Oracle will dominate the database market.

hope that MySQL will not be killed like Microsoft's Foxpro

To put it simply, Oracle couldn't kill MySQL if they wanted to. Of course they could discontinue it, or release new versions under different licensing terms.. but even if they did that, there's most likely nothing to stop the opensource community from continuing development. If they discontinue the product or change the license, that doesn't eliminate any versions of the software that were already released under the GPL license. The opensource community could continue to develop a database engine based on MySQL under those terms and Oracle would have a hard time stopping it (if they could at all). According to the GPL it would be perfectly legal. The name may need to be changed in that case to prevent a trademark battle with Oracle, but as far as copyright goes there wouldn't be a thing they could do about it as long as any new projects were based on GPL code and licensed under those terms.

Of course, if there are any patents involved Oracle may or may not be able to use that to their advantage (depending on Sun's patent license, which I haven't read).

That's the beauty of opensource software. Once a project is successful and builds up a community it takes on a life of its own and there aren't many easy ways to kill it. You could try, but most likely that would just result in a "fork" of the project and the community moving on and keeping it alive.

i don't think it will happen

Hi,
Less than a month after it walked away from a $7 billion deal with IBM, Sun Microsystems says that it has entered into a definitive merger agreement with database and enterprise software giant Oracle. Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. It's been approved by Sun's board of directors.

mySQL is free. As long as it has developers, it will remain.