Recent events have convinced me that it's finally time for me to start blogging.
The first thing I would like to talk about is about Sun buying MySQL AB. In a second blog entry I will then talk about the Maria storage engine, a project that I have been working on for the past two year (first half time and now full time).
Personally I think that the deal with Sun is the best thing that could have happened to us. When David, Allan and I originally took on investors on MySQL we did know that there was only two ways out; Either we would make an IPO or we would be bought by some large company.
I was always a bit afraid of the IPO route, as in this case there was no guarantees long term that MySQL AB would be a company that would focus on open source. I am quite confident that With Sun, who has made strong commitments to open source with things like Open Solaris, Open Office and making Java open source, our open source inheritance will be taken good care of.
I think Sun is the best possible buyer, because of the following reasons:
(Note that this is of course my interpretation)
- Sun is committed to open source.
- Sun doesn't have an database of their own; In other words, no risk of internal conflicts between similar products.
- Sun understands what it means to be a virtual company where people work from home.
- Sun has a good understanding of developers needs and there is a good chance that the integration of the two companies will be relative smooth.
- Sun has said they will let the MySQL developers continue work as before in their own unit and without big changes (except of course changes for the better!).
Sun is a hardware company who has been for a long time in a transition to also be a software company. In their software space they where first closed source but has lately started to change most of their software to open source/free software.
MySQL AB on the other hand is a company that was originally totally committed to free software / open source but who has lately changed to be more closed.
This deal will allow both companies to learn from each others successes and failures and build a stronger company than we would have been able to do separately.
A match truly made in heaven (sorry Sun :). Lets hope that we here on Earth will be able to make the best of it!
Regards,
Monty
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4 comments:
This is a great outcome. Both MySQL and Sun have a history of innovation and doing things their own way. And with Sun's variety of SMP/multicore/multithreaded servers, this should get MySQL to scale on big servers sooner.
Welcome Monty!
Now we need to get your blog added to Planet MySQL.
Why not at least have clustered index as part of Maria's road map? I would like to hear your thoughts on it.
Frank
After reading your blog i realized that it is somehow a good decision to MySQL. When i first read the title i thought it will be a sad news to people like us who support open source technology.
A wise decision. I thought we should be sad about this.
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