Blog: Mark Madsen

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MySQL Now a Part of Sun - A New Center for Open Source?

There have been IPO rumors for quite a while, but I doubt many people expected Sun to buy them. There are some details on the rationale and what Sun is doing to extend MySQL support at Jonathan Schwartz's blog.

This is a sign of maturation of open source: operating systems haven't been as central as other parts of the stack, particularly databases and middleware. Sun's investment here may be a downward sign for Red Hat and Novell, neither of which has done well beyond the operating system. Look at what's happened with JBoss since the Red Hat acquisition. There's still risk for Sun given the challenges they've had with the decline of Solaris and the hardware business.

I did like Schwartz's discussion about a problem open source companies face: startups and tech companies want open source by default, while mainstream companies want commercial support by default:
"But as I pointed out, we heard some paradoxical things, too. CTO's at startups and web companies disallow the usage of products that aren't free and open source. They need and want access to source code to enable optimization and rapid problem resolution (although they're happy to pay for support if they see value). Alternatively, more traditional CIO's disallow the usage of products that aren't backed by commercial support relationships - they're more comfortable relying on vendors like Sun to manage global, mission critical infrastructure."

Personally, I think Sun and MySQL are a good fit. MySQL is close enough to the platform that it doesn't confuse Sun, who seems to have trouble when they move very far from the base platform. MySQL gets a boost in mainstream IT visibility and legitimacy, as well as some new support and service offerings.

Update: I found this Q&A on the MySQL blogs explaining more about the acquisition. One thing I did forget was Sun's commitment to Postgres. I wonder where that's going to go? Other companies haven't been that successful making money there, so could this be something that ends Sun's Postgres support?

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