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Sun Buys MySQL
Krow alerted me that MySQL has been bought by Sun. Right now there is only a brief announcement but it discusses what the acquisition will mean for the core developers, community etc.
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Sun has been thinking about this for a while
http://www.news.com/2100-7344_3-5562799.html
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080116/20080116005349.html?.v=1
"As part of the transaction, Sun will pay approximately $800 million in cash in exchange for all MySQL stock and assume approximately $200 million in options."
This is quite interesting news! Check out what Jonathan Schwartz has to say about this:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/
Dependency hell? =>
Oracle bought both InnoDB and BerkeleyDB. Those still happen to be two of the better engine options of MySQL.
Ulterior motives aside, looking at it from the marketing perspective it presents a nice unified package for the big boys. On the golf course the sales drones will have clear tit-for-tat competition with MS's offerings.
From the official blog:
So why is this important for the internet? Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the internet. No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS. With this acquisition, we will have done just that - positioned Sun at the center of the web, as the definitive provider of high performance platforms for the web economy. For startups and web 2.0 companies, to government agencies and traditional enterprises. This creates enormous potential for Sun, for the global free software community, and for our partners and customers across the globe. There's opportunity everywhere.
You can already use MySQL as the database engine for Open Office.
The development environment in OOo (Base) is a database client, not a database engine. Base does bundle the HSQLDB database engine, but even that is just XML tables, and shouldn't be used for anything serious.
As far as the quality of Base, yep it's rough, but it's also brand new for OOo v2. It's being actively developed, and there are plansto use it to allow users to share data from several FOSS packages within the suite.
* Btw, I know you were just trolling, but I thought this was worth an answer, since desktop databases are a badly misunderstood class of software.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Damn it! Now they will rewrite it in Java. It will no longer be the fastest database engine, after the rewrite, it will certainly be the slowest.
Sun already has an embeddable db engine written in Java called Derby. It has pretty impressive features and performance.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Using protocols to communicate to a program or service is NOT linking!
I understand where you're coming from, which is why I moved to Postgres for all my new applications last year. However, as it stands now, I think MySQL is within their rights to use the GPL for the client. As far as I know, there is no way to communicate with a MySQL server without linking to their client library (i.e., libmysqlclient.a). At one time there was an attempt to maintain a fork of the old LGPL MySQL 3, but it never took off. Now, merely linking to the client library doesn't automatically create a derived worked (see Linus's explanation), however, in the absence of some other compatible library you could have linked with instead, it's pretty much impossible to say your linked program is independent of MySQL. And since independence is a requirement to have a non-derived work (i.e. the ability for a program to live a separate life, do something useful without the linked library), the program ends up being derived from the MySQL client, and has to abide by the GPL.
There is still plenty of argument around this topic, but again, it can be avoided by using Postgres, which IMHO is a better database anyway.
Hi!
We added triggers, stored procedures, and views in 5.0. Today there are publicly several transactional engines (supported by companies like Oracle, IBM, Solid, and yes ourselves). There are many other non-public transactional engines.
Cheers,
-Brian
You can't grep a dead tree.
There are many of us who have been working on MySQL for many years (my efforts with MySQL begin a decade ago). None of us are willing to move away from our open source roots. I've seen nothing that makes me think that Sun had any interest in doing anything foolish. They understand the value of MySQL being open source.
-Brian
You can't grep a dead tree.
As the creator of ZuluPad, I obviously recommend it as a desktop wiki...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack