Finally, after many months, Oracle's long-awaited acquisition of Sun Microsystems has been completed. Having joined Sun as part of the MySQL acquisition two years ago, I think it's a good outcome both for Sun and for MySQL. The vision behind Sun's acquisition of MySQL was right on: Sun wanted to become the leader in open source and use MySQL as

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It's gotta be tough for InfoWorld's overworked editors to figure out how to recognize the best open source products out there. Open source has become so pervasive in IT that there aren't too many areas where there aren't at least a half-dozen interesting pieces of open source technology from software infrastructure, networking, development tools, desktop software, you name it. I'm not a part of the decision making process in these awards, but I have empathy for them and all the different products they need to consider.

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Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote a four-part blog posting a few weeks ago describing Sun's overall business model and how it makes money from open source. The basic idea is to go from adoption to innovation and then 

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