OT - Sun to acquire MySQL

[Nathan 7]

Does anybody here care? I do! I think open source software is awesome and hope that it has a growing place in the "Industrial World". I wouldn't say this has much to do with PLCs directly, but it does have to with Enterprise Integration. I read about this on slashdot and commented about it in my blog.

[panic mode 246]

if I recall GNU licence allows sales of the product but it must remain open source. is that correct? also i didn't know Sun could afford such price, i was under impression that company is barely surviving. btw. i clicked view poll before voting and it doesn't let me vote (is this expected behaviour?).

[Chris Elston 78]

I dunno. But anytime a "good" open source software package gets bought up, there are going to be problems. I am curiuos to know what SUN or how SUN is going to handle it. They are either going to be jerks, or they are going to understand and reason with the community. The first one I can think of was RED HAT, though they didn't get bought. RED HAT was GNU, then they decided to not make it GNU anymore. HOWEVER, in the spirit of GNU, they promised the linux community a GNU version that would remain, and hence Fedora was born. I don't even know how you go about purchasing something that is community driven product like MySQL, how do you purchase something that is FREE? I think something like what RED HAT did has to remain. SUN can purchase the rights or source for MYSQL, but then I think the right thing to do would be do what RED HAT did, create a MySQL version that operates the way it currently does, community driven source code. However if you want offer a "commerical, beefed up version, then buy this "x" product over here and will we support all of our custom source code changes to make it run better than the community GNU version. I believe that's what will happen. I am calling it right here, right now in my crystal ball.

[Nathan 7]

MySQL is GPL. Your description sounds correct. edit - please read this. It's a fascinating interview with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on their open source business strategy. Sun's been doing well in the last few years. According to this, They've been adding to their open source collection including: Open Office, Open Solaris, GlassFish, NetBeans and Open Java. They also cite huge customers like: Google, FaceBook, Nokia and just about anyone who has a WordPress blog or server. They're obviously an integral portion of the oh-so-popular LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Edited 20 Jan 2008 by Nathan