Anyone have any commentary on the buyout of MySQL AB by Sun Microsystems?

There’s more here:
- MySQL’s Announcement
- Sun’s Announcement
- Sun’s CEO (Jonathan Schwartz) posts about it in his blog

Depends on the current mood Sun is in at the moment, evil or good

But in all honesty it looks like MySQL AB was looking to be bought out by someone and hence I think Sun would have been one of the ‘better’ companies (I wouldn’t mind IBM at the moment either) to have been taken by as opposed to some other evil force like MS.

It was worst than MS if MySQL AB was bought by Oracle and they start to charge everybody… Well, I don’t believe they could do this, but as Sun is a good source of free products, in this sense I don’t have reasons to be afraid. By the way, thanks to Sun, I think our loved database engine will have nice upgrades in a near future.

Since everyone (except me) put this as a positive thing—I’d love to hear some reasoning behind it!

My reasoning:

I’m worried SUN is going to try to monetize this thing in some clever and duplicitous way.

Software monetization (is it a word? ) is going from buying software to selling service contracts. So they better have the software in their hands a lot of people use and mysql is a nice example. Like you can read on the ceo blog the companies who use mysql are found in almost all industries.

I’m worried SUN is going to try to monetize this thing in some clever and duplicitous way.

If they do, there’s always Pg.

@codelearn - It’s unlikely they would do that considering that they’ve been going to great lengths to open source a lot of their existing software; Java for instance. Of course they want to make money from MySQL - they just payed a whopping sum for the thing and they need to profit from the acquisition. But, they will (likely) make money through support and enterprise class add-ons, which is what MySQL does already.

@CodeIgniter - I agree.

I don’t think there will much change in the near future as most of the core development team will likely remain unchanged.  The long-term direction of MySQL may be quite different as the development team starts to change and SUN engineers begin to greater influence MySQL.  It would be safe to bet that tighter Java integration is on the way and maybe some Solaris-only performance enhancements.  I just hope they don’t start to stray too far from LAMP.

I just hope they don’t start to stray too far from LAMP.

If they do, there’s always Pg.

Sun may be able to finance some of MySQL’s improvements.  Sun had deep pockets at some point, not sure if they still do.