Regardless of whether there is a 'commercial' option for the source code itself, there is plenty going on with GPL-based development and an alternative for Inno

Regardless of whether there is a 'commercial' option for the source code itself, there is plenty going on with GPL-based development and an alternative for InnoDB led by Monty Widenius (Monty AB's development of the Maria Engine should lessen the concern due to Oracle's purchase of InnoBase and their patent ownership / 'original author' status). It's already been discussed at length, so I'll just say I'm not convinced it's in Oracle's best interest to try to kill off InnoDB in order to decrease consumer options for MySQL. I guess we'll see what they do if the EC approves. But the market for 'commercial services' around MySQL is doing just fine -- Percona and MontyDB being the most obvious (more here: http://lwn.net/Articles/329626/ http://lwn.net/Articles/329626/). Not an endorsement, but our team decided to start using Percona and it's been OK; over the last couple years we didn't end up using MySQL AB's support that much anyway.