Sun buys MySQL
Well... I don't know what this will mean yet, but the news was released about 12 hours ago that Sun Micosystems is going to buy MySQL for a grand total of 1billion dollars (I shit you naught) of cash and stock options.
You can find the announcement here on the offical Sun website.
With Java going open source about a year about and Sun having heavily contributed to OpenOffice and other open source projects, it makes me wonder what exactly their plans are with MySQL. Supposedly they intend to optimize the LAMP stack across all platforms. This could be great if it happens. As long as they don't just sit on it or charge for licenses I think MySQL is in pretty good hands.
For those out of the loop, MySQL makes up the majority share of databases online, and is the main database used amongst PBBG developers because of its ease and that it's free.
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January 17th, 2008 - 05:25
The core of mysql is licensed under GPL. So it can always be forked if Sun goes crazy. IIRC, InnoDB support was going to go away (it is not GPLd) before Sun’s purchase. So perhaps Sun will contribute a transactional engine to mySql to take its place.
January 17th, 2008 - 10:37
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InnoDB
InnoDB is GPL’d. It’s just owned by Oracle is all. Not sure how Oracle will react to Sun (who just became a more significant competitor in the DB space) over this, retracting InnoDB support could be one move.
But again, it’s GPL’d so not the end of the world.
January 18th, 2008 - 21:28
MySQL is free and open source, but the company by that name makes quite a bit of money (has anyone ever looked at their enterprise packages? they ain’t cheap). So there’s no real worry that Sun would attempt to close the source of future releases or something. MySQL is one of those open source success stories – you get the whole world to use an help develop your product for free, both giving and taking from the community and at the same time make a profit selling quality, enterprise-level services to companies that need them and are more than willing to pay for them.