Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced yesterday that they have acquired the Open-Source database platform MySQL. This is a huge purchase and one of the largest acquisitions of an Open Source entity that we’ve ever seen.
The goal, says Schwartz, is to put a Fortune 500 vendor behind the innovative technology powering many next generation web-based services. To accomplish that goal Sun is “putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP” (and MAMP, WAMP, and of course Sun’s own SAMP…).
Support of open source projects is nothing new for Sun. They have been a positive force behind several other projects in the past including Java, ZFS, NetBeans and OpenOffice.org. This bodes very well for the future of MySQL and companies offering other higher-priced options for production databases will be watching very closely to see what edge this provides in the Enterprise space.
With the acquisition Sun picks up “clients” who may not be using Solaris, or even Java in their implementation but are major players in the Web 2.0 market. These include Google, Facebook, Nokia and Wordpress. Kudos to Sun for putting some more muscle behind the Open Source movement, and here’s hoping some more major corporations will now be willing to take a “leap of faith” and make more use of a proven and effective open-source technology.
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