Pulling the rug out from under my own feet

I've been lucky with the press so far - no major misquotes. As the author of articles for monthly publications, I have the time to check quotes with my interviewees prior to publication. Unfortunately, for a web publication with daily deadlines, this is not practical. Hence, I have been misquoted.

I'd like to clarify the misquote.

First of all, I want to tell you that I think the world of Charlie Babcock at Information Week. I respect his writing, and he was an early believer in the open source work I was doing at La Quinta Inns. He covered this in the article, "Open Source, Part 2" back in early 2004. This article led to an invitation to speak at the Information Week Spring 2004 Conference, which opened all sorts of doors for me down the road. We all have people in our lives whose actions propel us. Charlie is one of those people to me.

Charlie published a piece yesterday entitled "Sleepycat CEO Says Oracle Needs To Learn About Open Source Communities". In this article, I am quoted as saying: "Now MySQL has had that rug pulled out from under them" regarding Oracle's acquisiton of Sleepycat. Let me explain the full context of this quote.

Charlie and I were talking at the end of the first day of OSBC. This was the same day that Oracle announced its acquisition of Sleepycat. Charlie wanted to place this acquisition in context and I gave him my perpsective on recent events concerning the open source database space. Charlie was taking notes while I was talking, but I was less prepared to be quoted.

I was told months ago (a rumor, although from a source I trust) that after the Oracle acquisition of Innobase, MySQL was in negotiations with Sleepycat to migrate their Pro Certified Server database engine from InnoDB to Berekeley DB. If this rumor was indeed true, then the rug would have been pulled out from under MySQL's feet a second time.

I thought it was important to put this quote in context. The first half of the statement is missing and it was concerning a hypothetical situation.