Sun buys MySQL

[manlymatt83]

Sun has acquired MySQL.

 

[Crusty]

Yep, there's already a thread going on in the *nix software forum.

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2142920&enterthread=y

 

[her209]

Noooooo!!!

 

[Skeeedunt]

/wrists

 

[spyordie007]

Hmmm, this does not give me a warm fuzzy feeling.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah this blows. Time to try out postgres SQL and guess we'll start seeing web scripts follow suit by making them use that system instead of MySQL. Kinda sucks, since MySQL was a great product.

 

[Nothinman]

Sun already employs the lead developer of PostgreSQL so the only difference there is that they don't own the brand name.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Hmmm time for someone to come up with a new open source DBMS then. Though I hear they may keep it free. So we'll have to see what happens. Just scary when such a widespread application ends up owned by a big corporation since its future is unpredictable at that point.

 

[Nothinman]

MySQL was already owned by a for-profit company, MySQL AB, so that's not changed. Unless every developer who's worked on MySQL signs over their rights to Sun (or previously signed them over to MySQL AB) the code won't be able to be closed in full and the last GPL release will still always be GPL so anyone can fork that if they want.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Hmm true as long as someone stashes the source code somewhere, which I'm sure many have already done.

Mind you, Sun is not really known as a evil corporate company, so I trust them with it more then I would trust say, Microsoft. Apparently most of their software is free, they make their money off server hardware.

 

[Nothinman]

Stashes the source? It's mirrored on thousands of sites already and on probably 100x times as many workstations easily because of people packaging it for different distributions. If a fork does happen availablility of the GPL'd source code won't even be on the list of potential issues.