You know, back in the day, Oracle did exactly the same thing themselves - they released their product on IBM mainframes because no-one would take them seriously otherwise. They even had to leverage a consulting contract with the CIA to claim to be "government contractors" to convince IBM to sell them ones.

By no means did they invent this strategy, nor are they the only ones to use it, they're not even the only database vendor. MySQL relies equally on "magic". Selling on your technological merits doesn't work. Look at Sybase and Informix.