+1 on this one.

The current state of CentOS6 is really not optimal: Lagging more than half a year behind Redhat means that there are security fixes for known vulnerabilities that are not applied to your system, and the same goes for bugfixes that may have an impact on overall stability of your systems (as in "lost man hours because of inaccessible services). I know that CentOS has promised to back-port critical security fixes from RHEL 6.1 to CentOS6 but that honestly makes me feel worse about the hole thing - in that case we would have a CentOS6 that was some unholy mix of RHEL 6.0 and RHEL 6.1, something I *really* don't want to be responsible for.

About a year and ago we had 8 RHEL subscriptions that were mainly maintained because we wanted to support OSS development - today we've replaced 30 of the CentOS installations we had back then with RHEL installations, simply because we had too many instability problems with virtualization on CentOS. Converting the servers to RHEL (not reinstalling - just changing a few configuration files and adding them to our Redhat Network) and installing the latest RHEL 6.1 kernel solved the problems in every single case - no exceptions.

Tell your CIO from someone who has been there that he will most likely be wasting more money on spent (or lost) man hours during the year than the subscription will cost you. If someone is relying on the services provided by the servers, there is a real risk that they will spend at least some time on waiting for you to get things back on track, and that is probably going to amount to real money lost pretty quickly.

No chance in hell. We're talking about Neelie Kroes here, and if there is one unbribable, tough bitch in the entire EU, it's her - and thank goodness for that. In my world, things approved by Neelie Kroes is most likely really OK.

OK, to be honest they actually do a bit more OSS work than I thought - the only projects I ever recall hearing of is InnoDB, which I don't know if they still actively maintains as it's not on the list on the page you linked to, and OCFS2.

Still, none of these projects are even remotely close to MySQL in terms of scope and complexity.

Depends on the definition of "large".
One of the leading Danish Banks, Jyske Bank (4.145 employees, 122 offices), recently announced that they would be switching their online banking system to MySQL - the announcement (in Danish) is here:

http://dk.sun.com/sunnews/press/2009/090226.jsp

I fear that we'll see a standstill in MySQL development until one of the recent forks gain enough traction for it to be accepted across Linux distributions and see an uptake in development efforts from third parties.

Oracle developing MySQL? How many open source projects does Oracle maintain today (except from a ripped off OS)? How many small and medium sized customers does Oracle have today? Exactly...

- if this happens in the USA. Other places may (and do) have a more relaxed law regarding this and those photos would be perfectly good to use.