I woke up to a very big announcement today. I was browsing digg and found that MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems. You can read more about the acquisition on the MySQL blog of Kaj Arno about the acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems. My take, with Sun releasing Solaris into the Open Source realm, this is just another piece of software that they can put under their belt and package with Solaris. I have included some blurbs from Kaj Arno’s blog below.
After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”, this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.
Facts on Sun Microsystems
* Founded 1982 by Andreas von Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy
* 34.200 employees worldwide, 13.9 billion dollars (9.4 billion euros) in revenues FY 2007, market cap (total value of all Sun shares) about the same as yearly revenues
* Grew astronomically with the Web, suffered from the Web bubble, now profitable over the last four quarters
* Lead by Scott McNealy until 2006, now by Jonathan Schwartz (a prolific blogger)
* The world’s biggest contributor to Open Source: Open Office, Java (now under GPL), GlassFish, NetBeans — and soon MySQL
* Environmentally friendly; large numbers of distributed employees working at least partially from home
* Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, just south of Cupertino (MySQL’s North American headquarters)
* Counts some of the worlds most brilliant innovators amongst its current and past employees
Sun’s track record is embodied by individuals with a solid set of FOSS values, such as Simon Phipps (Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer), Ian Murdock (Debian founder, now Sun’s Chief OS Strategist), and Josh Berkus (PostgreSQL lead). I’ve met all three in various FOSS arenas, I respect their work, and I am looking forward to be working closely with them.
Absolutely not. MySQL is still being managed by the same people, and the charter is still the same. There is no need for reducing the set of platforms or languages. It only makes sense for us to continue to support defacto Web development standards like LAMP, as well as emerging ones like Ruby and Eclipse. This deal is about addition, not subtraction.
But I don’t expect that in any way to be at the cost of other popular operating systems (Linux, Windows, Mac OS/X, other Unixes etc.) or development environments (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python, ODBC, C++, C#, VB etc.). MySQL grew with LAMP and MySQL without LAMP at its core is simply unimaginable. It was MySQLs part of LAMP that interested Sun in the first place. Hence I don’t see Sun having a platform migration strategy, but to continue to be an integral part of the dot in .com.
What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for the core MySQL community?
I’d like to think that the acquisition of MySQL by Sun will be seen as good news also by the core group of users who form the active MySQL community. This is because Sun is a safe haven for MySQL. Sun knows Open Source, and to the extent things change, I expect Sun to add value to our community. I don’t expect huge change, though. We continue to work with our quality contributors, we continue to provide our MySQL Forums, the Planet MySQL blog aggregator, we remain on the #mysql-dev and #mysql channels on Freenode, we provide MySQL University lessons, we meet at the MySQL Users Conference. We’ll put effort into connecting the many FOSS enthusiasts and experts at Sun — whom we will now learn to know better — with our active user community.
