Sun Microsystems has acquired MySQL for $1 billion in cash and options. That's now old news. The implications of the deal, however, have yet to be felt, but this deal means several key things for open source.
In no particular order:
- Sun is directly competing with Red Hat to become the heart of the open-source business community. I've written before that either Red Hat with its operating system or MySQL with its database could become the center of an alternative ecosystem to the Proprietary Bloc (Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM). With Sun at the helm of MySQL, MySQL just became a lot more credible in this role as it now has cash to match its ambition.
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Demonstrating, once again, that Sun is a true member of the open source community, the company just announced that
it will release the Solaris Cluster source code through the HA (High Availability) Clusters community on the OpenSolaris site. Sun is releasing the Open High Availability Cluster in response to interest and feedback from the OpenSolaris community. For the first time, developers will be able to participate in the evolution of the software itself, as well as leverage the open source cluster technology to develop and support highly available application services.
"Sun is releasing this code to the community to accelerate innovation around clustered solutions, in a world moving quickly to scale-out architectures. When applied to Solaris or other technologies, the Solaris clustering code is a great base to support clustered and HA systems innovation throughout the community," said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "The Open HA Cluster code allows open source developers to use the same Solaris HA infrastructure that powers enterprises' most mission critical applications with their open source and network facing applications and services."
Sun's first contributions are application modules, or agents, which enable open source or commercially available applications to become highly available in a cluster environment.
This is a great move on Sun's part. The company continues to show that it knows how to play in 21st Century software. The value begins at the software but is priced beyond it. Good work, Jonathan and team.
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