SUN + MySQL: Just in case you missed it
MySQL announced yesterday that they have been acquired by SUN Microsystems! It’s pretty significant news for a lot of people as it’s probably the most popular Database system on the web and makes up the “M” in LAMP.
Personally, I couldn’t be happier with the acquirer; SUN is the biggest contributor to Open Source of any corporate and should bring plenty of technical expertise to the MySQL table.
Of course, there have been no solid roadmap announcements from SUN in these early days, so any commentary on the direction for MySQL, at this stage, are relatively speculative. But, Jonathan Schwartz, SUN’s CEO/President made a fairly informative post on his blog about the acquisition and also some insight into what he envisages in the future.
He suggests that many CIO’s want access to the source code, yet also want enterprise class support, which is something SUN is well known for (at a hefty price I might add). He also mentions wanting to add support for ZFS, SUN’s incredible file system and of course, their mainframe servers which I guess 0.0001 of MySQL’s market might be interested in??? Finally, he mentions wanting to “water the trees” - by investing in [read: gifting to] universities and other academic institutions.
I really don’t think anything earth-shattering is going to come out of this, as MySQL AB was a corporate company as is SUN. We should see some interesting innovations in the future and probably in the meantime, plenty of FOSS purists crying wolf. :P
