Oracle open source overlord calls it quits, leaves with big ol' pile of shares

One of Oracle's longest-serving senior team members, chief corporate architect Edward Screven, has announced plans to retire on a comfortable sum.

Screven joined Oracle in 1986, famously leading the company's open source strategy since the 2009 buyout of Sun Microsystems, with which Big Red acquired development language Java and open source database MySQL.

According to an official Oracle missive shared with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Screven handed in his notice on January 8, saying he intended to retire from Oracle by the end of February. It said he would assist in the transition of his duties until then. He is also set to continue serving on the Oracle board.

Reporting to executive chairman and chief technical officer Larry Ellison, Screven drives technology and architecture decisions across all Oracle products to ensure that product development is consistent with Big Red's overall strategy.

According to an Oracle proxy statement [PDF], the exec owned 3.367 million shares in Oracle as of September last year, making him the fourth-largest individual shareholder after co-founder Ellison, CEO Safra Catz, and vice chairman Jeffrey Henley. Reports claim Screven made just under $21 million in 2024, including a $900,000 salary and around $17.4 million in stock awards. Oracle's annual revenue is around $53 billion.

Oracle's official blurb says Screven leads the teams that "drive innovative product strategy, engineering, operations, sales, and technical support for a wide range of Oracle products."

"He is responsible for Oracle Labs, which identifies, explores, and transfers new technologies that have the potential to substantially improve Oracle's - and customers' - business. He's responsible for many of Oracle's best-known open source programs including Java, Oracle Linux, MySQL, and [hosted hypervisor] VirtualBox," it said.

An Oracle veteran, Screven is also in charge of the company's open source businesses, including Linux, virtualization, and MySQL. Screven leads company-wide strategic initiatives too, including industry standards and security.

In 2023, Screven and colleagues claimed IBM/Red Hat was trying to kill open source competition among Linux distributions to boost its bottom line, and pledged to keep distributing Oracle Linux source code for free.

Screven was a defender of MySQL, saying in 2014 that the idea Oracle would kill the open source database was "a very mysterious concept to us."

Until recent years, Oracle won praise for its custodianship of MySQL alongside its proprietary databases. But last year, critics said the latest release was underwhelming, and voiced fears that Oracle was becoming too focused on Heatwave, its proprietary analytics database built on MySQL, which Screven also heads up.

Screven studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and, according to his corporate bio, continues to enjoy programming in his personal time. We figure he'll have plenty more time for that without the quarterly targets of the day job. ®