Wednesday, January 16, 2008

MySQL has been assimilated

...by Sun, for $1 billion. Bummer. I shudder whenever I see companies at the forefront of Open Source being gobbled up by giants such as Sun. I still don't know what Sun's Open Source strategy is -- they've been going back and forth with their support for Linux, and they seem to be pushing Open Solaris pretty heavily these days, although I personally don't know anybody in the OSS community who is using Open Solaris. UPDATE: Tim O'Reilly thinks this is a great fit for both Sun and MySQL, and says that "Sun has staked its future on open source, releasing its formerly proprietary crown jewels, including Solaris, Java, and the Ultra-Sparc processor design." Hmmm...maybe, but Sun has always struck me as being bent on world domination, just as bad as Microsoft.

Update 01/18/08: Here's a really good recap on the MySQL acquisition at InfoQ. Most people express a warm fuzzy feeling about this whole thing. I hope my apprehensions are unfounded.

In other acquisition-related news, Oracle agreed to buy BEA (the makers of WebLogic) for a paltry $7.85 billion.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Grig, though Sun is a big company, arguably they are one of the openest (at least in terms on LOC). OOo, Solaris, Java and now MySQL are all big projects (interestingly enough, they have also hired one of the core Postgres devs a year or so back). Perhaps they haven't herded the community as well as one might, but they appear to be headed in the right direction.
They also have a real opp. now that Office 2008(or 9) is dropping VBA. OOo will be the only cross platform option (with macros working accross it). And you can program OOo in python!
Now if they only put some effort into Jython...

Grig Gheorghiu said...

Hi, Matt -- thanks for your comment. You're right in that there are big projects at Sun which have been open sourced (or assimilated from OSS). But, as you say, I haven't seen anything from them in terms of community building. Or maybe they're just not advertising that aspect. In any case, I'm still troubled by it :-)

Grig

Jeremy Cantrell said...

MySQL has always had a shady license. Is this really that big of a change?

tp said...

Grig, I find it odd like you do. And I find it even more peculiar that MySQL rebuffed an Oracle acquisition almost a year ago. Perhaps Sun's price was too compelling for MySQL to walk away from. And what happens to Sun pushing PostGreSQL - does that go away now too?

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