Oracle has released news about changing policies of MySQL Enterprise Support effectively dropping annual support for Basic and Silver. The entry level support is now $3000 per server per year. The MySQL support team now part of Oracle has great resources however Oracle is in the business of making money. When a general company question for OOW is company income, and the first option is < $50 million it highlights that startups, and smaller companies are clearly not a focus.
The success of MySQL as an open source company has lead to other leading providers that now can provide enterprise level support. More importantly many organizations over per-incident support which is more cost effect. News in the past week has included Percona - New Support Option for MySQL , and today SkySQL with Kaj Arno’s Joining SkySQL Ab, back in the startup business . (Motivation for me to publish this draft)
For reference, this is what I received from Oracle prompting this post.
For those of you using Basic and Silver support we’re being told those options will no longer be available. If you wish to continue with Basic or Silver you will need to sign a multi-year agreement and you would be able to keep using Basic or Silver for up to another 3 years.