An attempt to summarize this thread, so that we can stop going round in circles.

However, I trust (based on Red Hat, IBM, Novell/Suse, Canonical, Mozilla, Xorg, etc) that Open Source does NOT depend on proprietary. Therefore, making the argument that the need to keep a proprietary version of MySQL out there to "save" the GPL version is wrong.

Also, if the Open Source model of development depends on a proprietary version, that's saying Open Source can't work. yet, Monty's current company is supposedly based on total Open Source. Either F/LOSS works and can exist without proprietary, or Red Hat should be going out of business.

Even with that, there is plenty of competition in the DB world - MySQL will live on (GPL guarantees that), and if companies bet on the proprietary version, they took a risk.

However, it does illustrate the dangers of having a single company control a GPL/Open Source project - you don't build the community that can help rescue or fork the project, because (IMO) one entity (the company) has special rights, and people don't like giving someone else rights they don't have.