However, perhaps another good side benefit to a major engineer leaving MySQL/Sun is the ball rolling faster on MySQL’s ability to accept community patches.

Right now MySQL has painted themselves into a corner with regards to development, and most community members (and I bet MySQL/Sun too!) would like to see that changed. In other words, MySQL AB forced itself to be the infrastructure for development, therefore it has to continue to be that infrastructure. Change would be welcome.

Wow, that seems like an amazing misjudgment on the state of these two open sources database communities. The big key to Sun’s support is that they don’t have to put a lot of effort into Postgres to reap a nice return, because so many other companies provide most of the development and infrastructure support that keep the project moving. With MySQL, Sun is that infrastructure and support, so the amount of effort needed is substantially higher. Granted, due to the investment they have already made, they are likely to keep pushing resources MySQL’s way, but I think you’re kidding yourself if you don’t recognize who is the cart and who is the horse in these two situations.