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Sun Microsystems buys MySQL

On the 16th January it was announced Sun Microsystems had purchased the popular open source database engine MySQL for $1 Billion US Dollars.

This is a fantastic result for the open source community which is a co-operative movement in software development where groups of programmers, engineer software for use under the General Public Licence (GPL) agreement.

MySQL has become an extremely important part of the application stack which powers a large amount of the internet. This application stack is referred to as LAMP standing for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python.

Too quickly explain Linux is an open source application which provides the interface between applications, utilities and device drives to operate the machine hardware. Next Apache is the web server which manages the flow of information requests and returning html to the user web browser.

As mentioned previously MySQL is the database engine used to store data such as blog posts. MySQL boasts there have been 5 million installations of the database engine. Finally PHP, Perl and Python which form the programming language(s) available to developers to powers server side operations to manage collecting the most resent blog posts for example.

LAMP machines are at the heart of the Web 2.0 movement providing cost effective software to provide the infrastructure allowing internet users access to information stored on sites like flickr, facebook, blogger and digg.

I believe the purchase of MySQL not only validates the work of all involved in its development it will also cause large shock waves in businesses geared towards developing large proprietary commercial software solutions by organisations such as IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft.

To date Sun Microsystems has a large amount of proprietary software which its in the process of opening up the software stacks and applications for developers to modify and improve.

This includes the Unix derived operating system Solaris and the Java programming language. Until now Sun Microsystems had no database application to compete with software vendor Oracle.

The most interesting opportunity for Sun however is the to push the Solaris operating system into the software stack that drives the internet. We have LAMP, MAMP (Macintosh)... what about setting up SAMP machines with Open Solaris the open source flavour of Sun Solaris, yes... no.

Simply this is a massive success for open source development in a world full of increasing uncertainty as market analysts report the slowing in the markets and slow tepid uptake of Microsoft Windows Vista only compound consumer frustration with frequent changes in technology and rising cost of living.

It is likely that the popularity and success of open source software products becomes more prevalent in mainstream markets over the next 18 months.

I expect to see more advertisement in new releases of Dell computers packaged with Ubuntu Linux rather than Microsoft Windows and the gPC packaged with Google Apps.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence