Sun Purchases MySQL

Sun recently completed its purchase of MySQL for $1B, a 5X premium over its $200M annual revenue. Historically, Sun has been a strong supporter of Open Source as demonstrated by the migration of its Solaris OS to the open source model as well as its founding of the largely open source Java language and toolset. Sun’s specific plans have not been announced other than it plans to integrate MySQL into its software, sales and service organization.

The MySQL product will indeed benefit from Sun’s ownership and closer integration with Sun’s other software products. Here’s why:

• Increased product validity and acceptance – what enterprise customer won’t feel better about MySQL being owned by a major corporate institution? Especially one with a track record for not wrecking open source projects?
• Sun can now offer a fully supported open source stack – LAMP (Linux, Apache Web Server, MySQL, and PHP). Its purchase of an open source database like MySQL that is largely deployed on Linux OSs may indeed signal such a willingness. Another possibility, closer integration with Solaris?
• Sun’s support of MySQL will put pricing pressure on the large DBMS vendors holding overall DBMS license costs down.
• Sun can at least theoretically help MySQL get even better at handling enterprise class DBMS tasks (clusters, mirroring, etc.).
• The purchase signals Sun’s willingness to continually evolve and embrace the new order mandated by the web. Sun is able to offer one of the best alternatives for creating Web 2.0 applications both in terms of technology (LAMP stack) and license models (pay for support, use for free).

Anyone feel that the purchase is not a good thing?

I welcome your comments.
Mike Brannan