It may be time for Oracle to donate MySQL -- as it did with OpenOffice -- to The Apache Foundation, or another open source house.

It's no secret that the Redwood Shores, Calif. company acquired Sun, at least in part, to stymie growth of the rapidly advancing open source relational database and preserve the pricetag of its own proprietary databases.

And that strategy has worked fairly well --to date. MySQL remains alive on paper but Oracle's foot dragging on development and refusal to release test cases for bugs and security patches for MySQL has reinforced its control over the code and sent hordes of open source developers to greener pastures.

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