Sun consumes MySQL

MySQL AB :: Kaj Arnö
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.

For first reac­tion was “Oh NOOOOO!”. But … maybe this will get help get MySQL more trac­tion in larger enter­prises. My real con­cern is that I will no longer have access to the belove “M” in the LAMP stack.
As Kaj put it:

Anx­i­ety on the part of MySQL users may stem from Sun’s suc­cess with Java and Solaris. Will MySQL’s sup­port for other pro­gram­ming lan­guages and oper­at­ing sys­tems now be given less attention?

Bu then he goes on to promise to “…con­tinue to sup­port defacto Web devel­op­ment stan­dards like LAMP, as well as emerg­ing ones like Ruby and Eclipse. ” That’s good news as I have been doing more and more work with Eclipse as my stan­dard IDE. It’s slow but free ( very impor­tant for me ) and sup­port my two favorite devel­op­ment lan­guages, Perl and PHP.

MySQL grew with LAMP and MySQL with­out LAMP at its core is sim­ply unimag­in­able.

Kaj then goes on to talk about the impact on the com­mu­nity and how MySQL is safe in Sun’s hands because “Sun knows Open Source”. Yeah… really… wasn’t it only recently after much com­mu­nity pres­sure that Sun released its tight con­trol of Java and was Open­So­laris a response to dwin­dling mar­ket share due to the Linux’s aggres­sive push into the enterprise?

I guess I’ll just have to believe Jonathan Schwartz when he say;

We’ll be invest­ing in both the com­mu­nity, and the mar­ket­place — to accel­er­ate the industry’s phase change away from pro­pri­etary tech­nol­ogy to the new world of open web platforms.

Author: Khürt
I'm a husband, a father to two very smart kids, an information security manager and a web developer. I'm a Mac geek who loves photography, hefe-weisse ale and Ethiopian coffee. I'm @khurtwilliams on twitter.