One respondent to the Marketwatch piece writes:

"I think Sun made a master stroke and doubt it is a conspiracy. MySQL is a very good DB but does not have the parallelization and replication features of an Oracle. Sun has the ability to do this given their deep technical roots. So, if they do that -- they can go head to head with Oracle on the high end DB market which is lucrative.  Also, Sun will charge for these high end features and leave the low-end version as free.  E.g. SugarCRM and many other quasi open source products do that.   

If it is a conspiracy, then Dvorak would be right and this would be a bad thing, but I doubt this is the case."

"Dvorak - this piece is an embarrassment. It was a challenge to get through it, but what struck me is that it appears you decided to write a hit piece first... then, you sat back and thought about what you could say, and this is the only thing you could muster up - an absurd conspiracy theory with Oracle being the silent puppet master. LOL . Bad science fiction. Others have already commented quite coherently on your misunderstanding of open source.. I won't bother repeating it."

"I have seen too many of these rough plays  by Wall Street (Silicon Valley) power elites to know better and to
worry that he might just be right. Of course only time will tell. But if he is right, by the time you/we find out he
is right it will be too late, that is MySQL would be a buggy piece of c*** of software by then that no one would
want to use it.

After all do you remember AOL buying Netscape, and then Netscape browser in a short time mysteriously
became a horrible buggy browser in comparison to IE when before being bought by AOL it was a much better
and less buggy browser compared to IE.

I think and I hope that EU anti trust commission will stop this."