I assert that it's too little, too late. If Solaris had been freed in the early part of the century, it might have made some headway against Linux. As it is, it'll be stripped of anything useful and portable and will be as irrelevant as HP/UX or OpenVMS for all but locked-in legacy users. This is an idiotic statement and I can't believe anyone modded you up. The source for OpenSolaris has been available for years. When will the stripping start? Where is ZFS for Linux? Where is DTrace, Zones, or any of the other cool new stuff?
Those are just some of the big items that get mentioned. Solaris' resource management and auditing tools are very impressive and I haven't seen anything comparable in linux that can give as much control for as little overhead.
ZFS doesnt offer me anything as im not managing servers Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
Is there any reason to switch? So what is it exactly that you do and what are you using now?
Sun had a lot of rights under previous licensing agreements before Novell even purchased the rights to Unix. The SCO deal seemed to be for some additional licensing and some drivers. Novell has claimed they won't be suing anybody over Unix anyway.
I'm still using Solaris 10 for a project I'm working on but am looking to move it to OpenSolaris before release.
Project Crossbow is one of the projects I wish was currently available now. It looks like the easiest way to set up virtual switches and networks which is a great feature to use along with zones. Right now I'm using a hack I found online to do this. Crossbow is a lot easier and integrated with SMF. I haven't really had time to really focus on making a management script for the hack yet. It's not too hard but I have been focusing on other areas.
Ok, you're going to find better explanations elsewhere but this is my understanding of it.
OpenSolaris is not necessarily a "distribution". Nexenta, Shillix, etc are "distributions" built on OpenSolaris. Project Indiana as I understand it, is a distribution coming directly from the OpenSolaris project.
At first OpenSolaris wasn't supposed to come up with it's own distribution, and now that it is it did some people didn't like it. Or they didn't like that they were going to call it OpenSolaris instead of Indiana or something like that. I'm not clear on all the details.
Since Solaris will be built using OpenSolaris, Project Indiana is also kind of like an early access release of Solaris 11, without JDS.
I ran into a similar problem. In a lot of cases, the drivers for the network cards are actually available. The problem seems to be that there is no mapping of the PCI id in/etc/driver_aliases. I've found that in many cases you can just add a line in that file with the appropriate pci vendor and product id and the nic will work. You can find the pci vendor and product id using prtconf -v and searching for the Ethernet Adapter section.
I prefer my spiders to be 20ft tall and wielding giant laser canons of death.... Who needs a covert force when you can have one that kicks ass and takes names? 20ft is insignificant compared to the habitable surface area of the planet. And it would be too impractical to create enough for your world domination plans. Which is pretty much the only reason for needing a 20ft tall spider that kicks ass and takes names.
A 20ft spider would also be pretty obvious so you loose out on the paranoia factor of covert devices. You may only have enough covert little machines to oppress 10% of the world, but the other 90% will live in fear of wondering if they're in that 10% or not.
Data centers emit pollution, it's just emitted at the generation facility, not the datacenter. When I said "If the electrical power generators were green, Data Centers would be by default." I meant the electric companies providing the power not their backup generators.
For a long time Bush has been downplaying or denying the effects of global warming. But behind the American People's backs he went ahead and built a geo-disaster proof bunker in 2001.
Lol, Sun owns Mickos. There is no 'trying to convince' -- there is only allowing him to stray from the corporate direction. -- Since it's the weekend I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you're drunk and not really this dense. I thought the info I quoted would make it clear but let me spell it out for you.
Mickos is still running MySQL as if it was it's own separate company and trying to find ways to make money from MySQL. Can't blame him, this has been his job for years. Schwartz has other plans for generating revenue from MySQL and Mickos needs to understand this and get used to the idea that he doesn't need to generate revenue directly from MySQL as much as previously.
In 2006 MySQL AB revenues were about $40 million. Sun was willing to pay $1Billion for the company so they obviously are looking to make the acquisition pay off in other ways. Even if MySQL is generating 3 times the 2006 figures now, that's still less than what would justify the purchase price.
Schwartz isn't being a dick and undermining Mickos' authority but giving him time to acclimate into the new role. At least that's the impression I'm getting. They don't want to give him the feeling of being a big fish in a small pond moving to a small fish in a big pond. So Sun buys an open source company and doesn't force them to make significant changes right away and toe the company line. Doesn't seem so bad compared to the alternate headline "Sun buys open source company and completely changes everything."
Mickos needs to get out of the MySQL CEO mentality and get a better understanding of his new position and MySQL's role in Sun. This is not a lesser role. It's actually a bigger role. Sun's plan for MySQL, if it works, will generate more indirect revenue from MySQL than it could directly generate so Mickos shouldn't focus on direct revenues as much for important features that could benefit the community. At least that's the plan.
Mickos has done a lot for MySQL as CEO and I'm sure he'll do the same in his new position with Sun. I think Schwartz is being smart by letting him ease into the new role because if he took the opposite route of imposing Sun's open source views on him I would imagine things wouldn't go smoothly.
If Mickos and the other former MySQL AB leadership don't like Sun/Schwartz's plans for MySQL they shouldn't have agreed to the acquisition. The sooner Mickos and the rest of MySQL get on board with the new plan, the sooner, Sun, MySQL, paying and non paying customers benefit. Provided the plan works:) Which I think it can.
Frankly, I can't understand why I should continue to hold this worthless stock and my best best for "making" any money seems to be selling the stock (now down 99.9% from where I bought it for a loss so that I can defray other tax liabilities. Sun stock seems to make the dollar look sound. Sounds like you bought during the dot com era when Sun's stock price really shot up. Even McNeally was questioning analysts why his company's stock was trading at 10x revenues. You're not going to make your money back. It took a long time for the stock to find it's bottom. The market went crazy with a bunch of companies, Sun included. It's not their fault the stock went up so high. While many of them benefited from this, in the long run I think it really hurt the company. Though it's their own fault they continued to keep splitting the stock.
Past few years though it's been doing pretty well up until the 10/07 and the recent 23% drop. It's been keeping inline with IBM, HPQ, DELL and other stocks in that segment. It's never going to have the type of increase you need to break even.
After a long stint of losses they finally started having consistent profitable quarters. Not sure why, but 1st and 3rd quarters aren't their strongest. This recent downturn might be a good buying opportunity since historically Q4 is usually when their biggest revenue quarter. I'm going by calendar quarters not their FY.
You came out of nowhere in this thread and asked me...
Why is it so crazy to expect that such a business decision would have been re-evaluated and brought into line with the CEO's public comments before announcing it? As far as I understand it based on his comments in his blogs and other places, Schwartz wants everything released from Sun/MySQL to be open sourced. Mickos has a different opinion.
When MySQL was on it's own, they needed to generate revenue off of MySQL and Mickos' decisions were made with that in mind. Now that MySQL is part of Sun, and Schwartz stated that they plan on using the acquisition to basically be able to provide optimized hardware/OS platforms for the MySQL users as well as support through Sun's larger support channel, some of the burden of generating revenue directly from MySQL may not be as important. After over 13 years of working in one mindset, I'm not surprised that Mickos couldn't just flip a switch and see the bigger picture Sun has in mind. He still wants to make sure his business unit is profitable rather than somehow contributing to Sun's other lines. At least that's been my understanding of it.
Mickos actually responded to the original thread on/. about MySQL. One interesting quote is:
Finally, please note that this entire decision and reasoning is something we developed on our own at MySQL AB several months ago, before being acquired by Sun. Sun has not asked us to do this or that. Or in fact, Sun has asked us the opposite - i.e. whether we should not just opensource all the stuff relating to backup. I will have such a discussion with my colleagues at Sun in the coming months. It seems like Schwartz is trying to stick to what he said, while Mickos has a different mindset. It's only been a couple of months since the merger. I wouldn't expect things to change this quickly. Plus, the features in question haven't even been released yet. I don't see how people like you keep trying to attribute this to Sun when it seems like Sun has is trying to convince Mickos to do what the community wants.
Like I said before, I think the backup stuff in question is related to InnoDB tables, but I may be wrong. This my have other problems if the features in question aren't developed by MySQL and have some InnoBase/Oracle licensing issues.
Sun acquired MySQL AB not the other way around. So why is it that the former MySQL AB's policies wrt Open Source override Sun's current stated policies? Maybe you should be asking someone at Sun or MySQL these questions. I just don't see the big deal because nothing has changed WRT MySQL. The impression people were trying to portray was that Sun was going to somehow make the community edition less available, when in reality MySQL hasn't changed because of the acquisition.
Maybe things will change. Maybe these things take time. It's not like Sun bought MySQL AB, fired all the 400 employees and replaced them with new employees that already know the direction Sun has regarding open source. For all intents and purposes, Mickos still runs MySQL, it's just a division of Sun now instead of it's own company.
And from what I understand, the features that were quoted were the hot backup and restore features which are only for InnoDB tables. InnoBase developed the hot backup utilities. InnoBase is a division of Oracle, so maybe Sun/MySQL doesn't even have the rights to open it up.
If you clicked on the link in the reply above yours you would have seen this comment from Schwartz:
"JesseStay : does he anticipate a fallout of original MySQL users or fork in the mysql code and how will they handle that if it does happen? 2008-04-25 12:26:30
JonathanSchwartz: I'm not anticipating a fork - Marten Mickos (SVP, Database Group at Sun, former CEO, MySQL) made some comments saying he was considering making available certain MySQL add-ons to MySQL Enterprise subscribers only - and as I said on stage, leaders at Sun have the autonomy to do what they think is right to maximize their business value - so long as they remember their responsibility to the corporation and all of its communities (from shareholders to developers). Not just their silo.
I think Marten got some fairly direct and immediate feedback saying the idea was a bad one - and we have no plans whatever of "hiding the ball," of keeping any technology from the community. Everything Sun delivers will be freely available, via a free and open license (either GPL, LGPL or Mozilla/CDDL), to the community.
And the scalability issue is not the x86 Slowaris systems they're running it on? Scalability of a platform is rarely just a RoR issue... Uhm. Check your facts, Twitter is running on Linux
The used to run on OpenSolaris when they were with Joyent. They tried to blame their outages on Joyent and changed hosting. That their still having problems can't be blamed on either Linux or Solaris in my opinion.
Wow, what is it about Ruby and bitterness/euphoria? In one ear I'm hearing how stupid I am for using PHP and that I could write all the code I've ever written in one line of RoR If you used Zope/Plone you wouldn't even need that one line of code. Seriously!?!?!
By the way, the guy is off with his Java Servlet/JSP example. It doesn't need to be as hard as he showed it to be.
Sure you can deny the sky is blue if you wanted to as well. However an independent study created for the EU says otherwise.
The study also backs up Sun Microsystemsâ(TM) claim to be the biggest donator of open source code. The top ten business contributors were as follows:
1 Sun Microsystems 51,372 Person-months 312m euros 2 IBM 14,865 Person-months 90m euros 3 Red Hat 9,748 Person-months 59m euros 4 Silicon Graphics 7,736 Person-months 47m euros 5 SAP 7,493 Person-months 46m euros 6 MySQL 5,747 Person-months 35m euros 7 Netscape 5,249 Person-months 32m euros 8 Ximian 4,985 Person-months 30m euros 9 Realnetworks 4,412 Person-months 27m euros 10 AT&T 4,286 Person-months 26m euros Also from here.
"Did you know that Sun contributes more than $200 million per year of intellectual property to the open source movement, in dozens of open source projects? The companyâ(TM)s historical contribution tops $2 billion. WOW!" A list of some of the open source projects Sun contributes to can be found on that link.
I can't provide technical details on the Java site because I am not a Java developer. I've seen the code once. I was asked to port some functionality we missed on the rewrite, so I took a look at the Java class that was a few hundreds lines long. I closed the window in anger, and rewrote the same functionality from scratch in a few minutes.
It isn't a "Ruby is Great, Java Sucks" argument. It's as simple as "Java Suck." Thanks for your informed opinion.
You want to see some of the things you can do with Java (and even Ruby) in a very quick and easy manner, have a look at some of the screencasts of Netbeans
Nah, it goes deeper than that. Dealing with Sun as a target platform is frustrating as can be. Are they investing money on SPARC or is it dead? Nothing from Sun has indicated they are giving up on SPARC. New versions have been coming out with their T1, T2 and Rock is coming next year. From what I understand Sun still makes more money from selling SPARC based machines than they do from their Intel/AMD boxes.
Do we need to verify our app run on Solaris 10 or are they dropping it for Linux? This I don't get. When did anyone at Sun every imply they were dumping Solaris for Linux? When Sun started selling x86 machines, they also offered Linux on them as well as Windows and Solaris. But nobody is stupid enough to ask if they're dropping Solaris for Windows. They were late to the x86 game with Solaris and have made great strides to make up for that. Solaris 10 on x86 is not some side project anymore. From what I understand it is on equal footing with Solaris 10 for SPARC and they share the same code base. There is even an OpenSolaris project to port it to Power based machines. You want to buy sun's x64 servers you can choose what OS to put on it (Solaris, RedHat, SuSE, Windows) and sun will even support it. What's wrong with them offering choices?
Should we develop our app for an old release of Java, or do we require our clients to have the latest version (including the OS patches required to install it?). That's all up to you, but my impression has been that Sun has been working hard to make sure companies like Microsoft don't screw with the JDK to make this easier for you. New versions of Windows machines I have seen have come with JDK 1.6 installed. I haven't had much problems with the few swing apps I have written. Personally, if I was in that situation, I would write for the platform that most of my users would likely have if it was a small application. If it was a large application things might be different. If you write your application for an older source target, you're not cutting off people who are using newer versions.
Honestly, I don't know how this confusion gets attributed to Sun. It seems more like the type of things HP or IBM sales reps might be telling you.
So based on what you said I still hold to my original point that your comparison of Java to Rails seems meaningless. You can't compare an application framework to a language.
If the original application didn't use a well established and mature web framework, then similar gains in "agility" and maintainability could have been made by staying with Java and using one of the available frameworks.
MySQL had a sketchy open source relationship long before Sun were in talks to acquire them. The comments that Sun is close sourcing MySQL is disingenuous. Nothing is being "closed", just that some new features may not be released in the community edition. This was true before the acquisition. The Monitor product is one example. MySQL Cluster was also originally developed for paying customers first, then eventually opened.
There is nothing stopping someone from developing similar features in MySQL's GPL'd code base. Open Source is supposed to be about give and take, not just expecting some company to pay for all the development itself and give it all away for free.
My point is that Sun isn't doing anything really different from what MySQL AB was doing. Which is why I mainly use PostgreSQL.
Slashdot Mirror
Those are just some of the big items that get mentioned. Solaris' resource management and auditing tools are very impressive and I haven't seen anything comparable in linux that can give as much control for as little overhead.
Dtrace doesnt offer me anything as im not a developer
SMF doesnt offer me anything i cant do with startup
IPS doesnt seam any better than deb or rpm
Is there any reason to switch? So what is it exactly that you do and what are you using now?
Sun had a lot of rights under previous licensing agreements before Novell even purchased the rights to Unix. The SCO deal seemed to be for some additional licensing and some drivers. Novell has claimed they won't be suing anybody over Unix anyway.
According to this blogger at zdnet, OpenSolaris is what Ubuntu wants to be when it grows up.
Yeah the title is flamebait but the article is very informative and provides screenshots.
And when I say screenshots. I mean camera shots of the screen?!??!?!
I'm still using Solaris 10 for a project I'm working on but am looking to move it to OpenSolaris before release.
Project Crossbow is one of the projects I wish was currently available now. It looks like the easiest way to set up virtual switches and networks which is a great feature to use along with zones. Right now I'm using a hack I found online to do this. Crossbow is a lot easier and integrated with SMF. I haven't really had time to really focus on making a management script for the hack yet. It's not too hard but I have been focusing on other areas.
Ok, you're going to find better explanations elsewhere but this is my understanding of it.
OpenSolaris is not necessarily a "distribution". Nexenta, Shillix, etc are "distributions" built on OpenSolaris. Project Indiana as I understand it, is a distribution coming directly from the OpenSolaris project.
At first OpenSolaris wasn't supposed to come up with it's own distribution, and now that it is it did some people didn't like it. Or they didn't like that they were going to call it OpenSolaris instead of Indiana or something like that. I'm not clear on all the details.
Since Solaris will be built using OpenSolaris, Project Indiana is also kind of like an early access release of Solaris 11, without JDS.
I ran into a similar problem. In a lot of cases, the drivers for the network cards are actually available. The problem seems to be that there is no mapping of the PCI id in /etc/driver_aliases. I've found that in many cases you can just add a line in that file with the appropriate pci vendor and product id and the nic will work. You can find the pci vendor and product id using prtconf -v and searching for the Ethernet Adapter section.
There are also a bunch of free network drivers for Solaris can be found here.
A 20ft spider would also be pretty obvious so you loose out on the paranoia factor of covert devices. You may only have enough covert little machines to oppress 10% of the world, but the other 90% will live in fear of wondering if they're in that 10% or not.
Click on the Ad that goes to another product, get no information about the product you were actually searching for.
Click on the real link from the search results for the product. Get no information about the product you were actually searching for.
How stupid of me to try and anthropomorphize people.
Bad example. When you get to the redirected page for the first search result, that page doesn't even contain the term "Serious Magic"
http://www.adobe.com/motion/
For those of you who are keeping score on who's talking the talk and who's walking the walk I offer this:
A tale of two houses
For a long time Bush has been downplaying or denying the effects of global warming. But behind the American People's backs he went ahead and built a geo-disaster proof bunker in 2001.I need to change my pants.
Wouldn't going green be easy for most good data centers?
Already have tons of batteries and infrastructure to be able to work off the grid. Diesel generators could be powered by bio-diesel.
Really this is kinda stupid. Data Centers don't emit anything. If the electrical power generators were green, Data Centers would be by default.
-- Since it's the weekend I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you're drunk and not really this dense. I thought the info I quoted would make it clear but let me spell it out for you.
Mickos is still running MySQL as if it was it's own separate company and trying to find ways to make money from MySQL. Can't blame him, this has been his job for years. Schwartz has other plans for generating revenue from MySQL and Mickos needs to understand this and get used to the idea that he doesn't need to generate revenue directly from MySQL as much as previously.
In 2006 MySQL AB revenues were about $40 million. Sun was willing to pay $1Billion for the company so they obviously are looking to make the acquisition pay off in other ways. Even if MySQL is generating 3 times the 2006 figures now, that's still less than what would justify the purchase price.
Schwartz isn't being a dick and undermining Mickos' authority but giving him time to acclimate into the new role. At least that's the impression I'm getting. They don't want to give him the feeling of being a big fish in a small pond moving to a small fish in a big pond. So Sun buys an open source company and doesn't force them to make significant changes right away and toe the company line. Doesn't seem so bad compared to the alternate headline "Sun buys open source company and completely changes everything."
Mickos needs to get out of the MySQL CEO mentality and get a better understanding of his new position and MySQL's role in Sun. This is not a lesser role. It's actually a bigger role. Sun's plan for MySQL, if it works, will generate more indirect revenue from MySQL than it could directly generate so Mickos shouldn't focus on direct revenues as much for important features that could benefit the community. At least that's the plan.
Mickos has done a lot for MySQL as CEO and I'm sure he'll do the same in his new position with Sun. I think Schwartz is being smart by letting him ease into the new role because if he took the opposite route of imposing Sun's open source views on him I would imagine things wouldn't go smoothly.
If Mickos and the other former MySQL AB leadership don't like Sun/Schwartz's plans for MySQL they shouldn't have agreed to the acquisition. The sooner Mickos and the rest of MySQL get on board with the new plan, the sooner, Sun, MySQL, paying and non paying customers benefit. Provided the plan works
Sun stock seems to make the dollar look sound. Sounds like you bought during the dot com era when Sun's stock price really shot up. Even McNeally was questioning analysts why his company's stock was trading at 10x revenues. You're not going to make your money back. It took a long time for the stock to find it's bottom. The market went crazy with a bunch of companies, Sun included. It's not their fault the stock went up so high. While many of them benefited from this, in the long run I think it really hurt the company. Though it's their own fault they continued to keep splitting the stock.
Past few years though it's been doing pretty well up until the 10/07 and the recent 23% drop. It's been keeping inline with IBM, HPQ, DELL and other stocks in that segment. It's never going to have the type of increase you need to break even.
After a long stint of losses they finally started having consistent profitable quarters. Not sure why, but 1st and 3rd quarters aren't their strongest. This recent downturn might be a good buying opportunity since historically Q4 is usually when their biggest revenue quarter. I'm going by calendar quarters not their FY.
When MySQL was on it's own, they needed to generate revenue off of MySQL and Mickos' decisions were made with that in mind. Now that MySQL is part of Sun, and Schwartz stated that they plan on using the acquisition to basically be able to provide optimized hardware/OS platforms for the MySQL users as well as support through Sun's larger support channel, some of the burden of generating revenue directly from MySQL may not be as important. After over 13 years of working in one mindset, I'm not surprised that Mickos couldn't just flip a switch and see the bigger picture Sun has in mind. He still wants to make sure his business unit is profitable rather than somehow contributing to Sun's other lines. At least that's been my understanding of it.
Mickos actually responded to the original thread on
Like I said before, I think the backup stuff in question is related to InnoDB tables, but I may be wrong. This my have other problems if the features in question aren't developed by MySQL and have some InnoBase/Oracle licensing issues.
Maybe things will change. Maybe these things take time. It's not like Sun bought MySQL AB, fired all the 400 employees and replaced them with new employees that already know the direction Sun has regarding open source. For all intents and purposes, Mickos still runs MySQL, it's just a division of Sun now instead of it's own company.
And from what I understand, the features that were quoted were the hot backup and restore features which are only for InnoDB tables. InnoBase developed the hot backup utilities. InnoBase is a division of Oracle, so maybe Sun/MySQL doesn't even have the rights to open it up.
If you clicked on the link in the reply above yours you would have seen this comment from Schwartz: "JesseStay : does he anticipate a fallout of original MySQL users or fork in the mysql code and how will they handle that if it does happen?
2008-04-25 12:26:30
JonathanSchwartz: I'm not anticipating a fork - Marten Mickos (SVP, Database Group at Sun, former CEO, MySQL) made some comments saying he was considering making available certain MySQL add-ons to MySQL Enterprise subscribers only - and as I said on stage, leaders at Sun have the autonomy to do what they think is right to maximize their business value - so long as they remember their responsibility to the corporation and all of its communities (from shareholders to developers). Not just their silo.
I think Marten got some fairly direct and immediate feedback saying the idea was a bad one - and we have no plans whatever of "hiding the ball," of keeping any technology from the community. Everything Sun delivers will be freely available, via a free and open license (either GPL, LGPL or Mozilla/CDDL), to the community.
Everything.
No exception."
The used to run on OpenSolaris when they were with Joyent. They tried to blame their outages on Joyent and changed hosting. That their still having problems can't be blamed on either Linux or Solaris in my opinion.
By the way, the guy is off with his Java Servlet/JSP example. It doesn't need to be as hard as he showed it to be.
There's plenty of denying that.
Sure you can deny the sky is blue if you wanted to as well. However an independent study created for the EU says otherwise. The study also backs up Sun Microsystemsâ(TM) claim to be the biggest donator of open source code. The top ten business contributors were as follows:1 Sun Microsystems 51,372 Person-months 312m euros
2 IBM 14,865 Person-months 90m euros
3 Red Hat 9,748 Person-months 59m euros
4 Silicon Graphics 7,736 Person-months 47m euros
5 SAP 7,493 Person-months 46m euros
6 MySQL 5,747 Person-months 35m euros
7 Netscape 5,249 Person-months 32m euros
8 Ximian 4,985 Person-months 30m euros
9 Realnetworks 4,412 Person-months 27m euros
10 AT&T 4,286 Person-months 26m euros Also from here. "Did you know that Sun contributes more than $200 million per year of intellectual property to the open source movement, in dozens of open source projects? The companyâ(TM)s historical contribution tops $2 billion. WOW!" A list of some of the open source projects Sun contributes to can be found on that link.
You want to see some of the things you can do with Java (and even Ruby) in a very quick and easy manner, have a look at some of the screencasts of Netbeans
Honestly, I don't know how this confusion gets attributed to Sun. It seems more like the type of things HP or IBM sales reps might be telling you.
So based on what you said I still hold to my original point that your comparison of Java to Rails seems meaningless. You can't compare an application framework to a language.
If the original application didn't use a well established and mature web framework, then similar gains in "agility" and maintainability could have been made by staying with Java and using one of the available frameworks.
MySQL had a sketchy open source relationship long before Sun were in talks to acquire them. The comments that Sun is close sourcing MySQL is disingenuous. Nothing is being "closed", just that some new features may not be released in the community edition. This was true before the acquisition. The Monitor product is one example. MySQL Cluster was also originally developed for paying customers first, then eventually opened.
There is nothing stopping someone from developing similar features in MySQL's GPL'd code base. Open Source is supposed to be about give and take, not just expecting some company to pay for all the development itself and give it all away for free.
My point is that Sun isn't doing anything really different from what MySQL AB was doing. Which is why I mainly use PostgreSQL.