Oracle bought Digital’s Rdb database that runs on the VMS platform to eliminate the competition. They couldn’t compete in the VMS world, because Digital included an Rdb run-time license with the OS, and Rdb had more advanced features than Oracle. First they sued Digital to stop them from including the run-time. Later, they bought Rdb and immediately raised support costs to be even higher than Oracle and stopped development to kill it off. Notice that they didn’t even mention Rdb in the list of database products in their announcement?

Looks like a road-map for what will happen to MySQL.