Sun to Buy Swedish Software Firm for $1 Billion:
Sun Microsystems, the large American seller of open-source software, said Wednesday that it would spend $1 billion to buy MySQL, a Swedish company that is the world leader in open-source database software used by Internet powers like Google, Yahoo, MySpace and YouTube.
I remember the sneering jibes about MySQL on /. back in 2000. Good for them. If you are doing mission critical work DBAs that recommend MySQL should get fired. Not ready for primetime. But in a world of blue-screens and Microsoft there's a lot of space out there for "good enough." In fact, chances are this website has a MySQL back end.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
I've been holding back on this one, but it is time to speak out.
On November 2, 2006,
href="http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyid=2006-11-02T230517Z_01_WEN9025_RTRIDST_0_TECH-MICROSOFT-NOVELL-BALLMER-DC.XML">Microsoft
and Novell announced a deal.
…
From CNN Money:
href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/">Microsoft
takes on the free world
Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a
big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants
royalties from…
Photographer Scott Rowed has penned an excellent essay on his experience making the switch to Linux, and he's agreed to place it here as a guest post. Please read it and pass it on to people, school districts, small island nations, and others who may benefit. This is a repost from about two years…
Think tanks vs Open Source
The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute's attack on Linux is just the latest in a series of attacks on Open Source by think tanks:
Date
Think Tank
Author/Title
Extracts
Sep 19, 2002
Competitive Enterprise Institute
James DeLongSoftware Wars: Open Source And…
I saw this reported when I read the paper this morning. (Article)
I was really struck by the "analyst" comment at the end.
"Some analysts expressed skepticism that Sun can make the deal work. Less than 1 percent of MySQL users pay for the software, Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research in San Francisco, said yesterday."
This is true; but saying something like that just seems to reveal an incredible amount of missing the point. MySQL shows up in all kinds of places that would benefit from a database; but are not in the market for one in any useful sense. Heck, my media player software(Amarok) is set up to use a MySQL database. As far as Sun is concerned, though, I might as well not exist one way or another. I pay nothing; but I also cost nothing, and wouldn't be in the position to pay for something even if MySQL wasn't available.
It is a particularly odd comment for him to make in light of the fact that Oracle has started rolling their own Linux distro, in order to offer an integrated stack for their database and the fact that Sun has been making a fairly serious attempt to push Solaris as an OS and as a better Linux than Linux. SAMJ doesn't sound nearly as nice as LAMP; but is almost certainly Sun's plan.
What would you recommend instead?
I'm taking a database course this semester and I'll likely be using MySQL, but most of what I do for school is too crappy to merit quality software. I never did get the right version of Eclipse with Photran running on my machine.
What would you recommend instead?
besides mysql? postresql is more powerful. i kind of think of the relation as that between java and c++. each has its uses.
This company is basically finnish its founders where swedish speaking finns.