In a blog post today, Jonthan Schwart, CEO of Sun Microsystems (JAVA) is announcing their acquisition of MySQl. This actually solidifies them as a great open source contributer.
The good news is Sun is already committed to the business model at the heart of MySQL’s success - first investing to grow communities of users and developers, and only then creating commercial services that attract (rather than lock in) paying customers.
This announcement comes without rumors or speculation from the blogosphere. The WSJ is reporting that Sun is paying “$800 million in cash and assuming $200 million in options to acquire MySQL”.
I think Sun is strengthening their presence in the enterprise market and continue to make advances to recover their “dot in .com” for years to come.
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.
I am firm supporter of Sun and their new software-harware philosophies. I recommend following Schwartz’s blog, since it is an interesting read.
Hopefully this announcement will stir attention away from the whole ZFS-Joyent disaster.
(Via Jonathan Schwartz.)