Is Sun’s acquisition of MySQL a good thing?
When I first heard that MySQL, the open source database provider had been purchased by Sun, my immediate response was one of dread. The perception of a merger aquisition seems to be a negative one when in reference to open source. The fear of course is that great software that we’ve been using for free is suddenly going to become proprietary and closed.
I read the announcement from both the MySQL homepage as well as Jonathan Schwartz’ (CEO of SUN) comments on his own blog. There were a couple things that caught my eye and thought I would comment on.
In Jonathan’s article he re-iterated a number of times Sun’s commitment to open source. It’s interesting to note that Sun is one of the few companies rising out of the personal computer boom of the early 1980s to be able to adjust to the current state of technology and software. They have struggled since the bubble burst in 2001 to stand as a hardware company alone. Sun seems to have realized that in order to provide complete solutions to their clients they needed to become far more service oriented.
The idea of providing services is proving to be far more solid of a business model than just a hardware or software company alone. It really just about emphasis. Microsoft runs a similar business, however the focus is on the software. Microsoft makes money by selling software and then providing services at further cost. Sun however is banking on the fact that companies would rather pay exclusively for services to make the software work.
Sun now has licensed a number of it’s products under the GPL and made them available open source. StarOffice was acquired from StarDivision and released open source as OpenOffice, the Lustre shared disk file system and even their longtime operation system Solaris has become open source.
The success of this merger is going to be dependent on how Sun relates to the open source community in the future. Keeping it’s place as an advocate and support will help it grow into the primary source of services for enterprise level applications. However if Sun decides to begin taking a heavy handed approach, an ego based insistence that the name Sun Microsystems be plastered high and low as the only provider, then they will not excel.
SAJM (Solaris, Apache, Java, MySQL) or whatever the acronym ends up being will become a new standard only if the open source community decides it, much the way LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) became such. But the first hint of Microsoft heavy handed tactics will put Sun back in the “proprietary” camp and left out of the open source “tree-house”.
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