I'm just speculating, but I suspect Oracle Database is a pretty huge cash cow - it's one of those enterprise products you can't get a quote for without a phone

I'm just speculating, but I suspect Oracle Database is a pretty huge cash cow - it's one of those enterprise products you can't get a quote for without a phone call. You're not going to have every small website owner make a big purchase like that, so something like MySQL is pretty much unavoidable for them. If it can become competitive with Oracle itself for enterprise users, though, I guess the numbers could be big enough it's worth breaking some promises to protect the cash cow.