Putting real effort into developing an awesome product. Then nobody would have seen the need for a fork. Of course they are afraid of cannibalizing their other

Putting real effort into developing an awesome product. Then nobody would have seen the need for a fork. Of course they are afraid of cannibalizing their other overpriced stuff. So they wanted to let it die a slow and painful death. In he grand scheme of things getting rid of the pesky competitor MySQL was only an afterthought in the decision to buy Sun, that was probably driven by the legal department. Also Oracle is pretty strong in the corporate Java space and has some great products there. So MySQL did never get the attention it deserved and needed to thrive.