Where does the MySQL community end up in a “megaOSS company?” - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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January 16, 2008
Where does the MySQL community end up in a “megaOSS company?”

Marten Mickos, CEO of the about to be acquired MySQL, ended the January 16, 2007 morning press conference concerning Sun’s (JAVA) acquisition of MySQL by saying his “1000s of partners should find (the acquisition) excellent news.” That’s debatable when it comes to partners such as HP (HP), IBM (IBM), and Unisys who compete with Sun. Or Google (GOOG), which doesn’t like being too tightly tied to any of the big IT providers, which is why Google is one of the biggest financial supporters of—if not contributors to—the open source software (OSS) movement.

But the acquisition will be helpful to the MySQL community including the OSS-heritage hybrids we tend to talk to and talk about here most often on the ebizQ.net Open Source blog and in the ebizQ Open Source Feature Articles section. These include Alfresco, JasperSoft, Pentaho, Red Hat, SugarCRM, Talend and others. I have been writing both here and on Research 2.0 (see link to right) frequently in our year-end review articles about the convergence of the OSS community with the large enterprise software providers. Although Sun is one of those large providers, the good news is that Sun is the most committed of those providers to the OSS concept.

Sun’s in fact a “megaOSS company,” to coin a term. It has projects ongoing at all levels of the stack: Glassfish, openSolaris, OpenESB, openOffice, and so forth. It will certainly continue to provide the MySQL community similar support. And it has conditioned its shareholders already for the different way that OSS pays off on the income statement, the dependence on subscription maintenance and the apparently unprofitable relinquishing of intellectual property assets.

One thing I am concerned about is what this acquisition means for Sun’s other efforts in the OSS database field. Sun has contributed to both the JavaDB (Berkeley) and postgreSQL efforts. It says it will continue that participation but human nature argues against it. To the extent those communities depended on Sun, it’s time to investigate other options.

Perhaps they could do a “Google search” for possible new corporate sponsorship.