A

As Zack reported, Sun is buying MySQL for ~$800M plus $200M in options. Interestingly, the MySQL acquisition represents 8% of Sun's current market cap (~$13 Bil). While I'm happy for the MySQL team, my views on Sun's OSS "strategy" are mixed at best. Let's hope Marten and team can help Sun realize that there is value in software...good software, not the stuff that was 5th in class, and remains so after open sourcing it. Oracle also announced it will acquire BEA for $8.5 Bil, a higher price than Larry rejected a little while back. The deal also represents 8% of... READ MORE

Holy simoleans, Batman. I wake up this morning, write a nice little Oracle tip and then next thing I see is Josh's post about Sun->MySQL. That was totally unexpected to me.

I browsed over to PlanetMySQL to get the scoop and what do I see, Sun buys MySQL for $1 billion to take centerstage in the web economy. I don't often agree with Matt but on this topic, I think I have to. This just makes a lot of sense for everyone involved. Sun, MySQL and MySQL users.

The first post I saw that shows concern about Sun's Postgres support is this one from the 451 Group, Sun acquiring MySQL for $1bn.

…

This morning we announced that Sun Microsystems has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL. Having spent the last four plus years working on making MySQL into a strong independent company, this is a bit of a change of strategy, but from my perspective it's all for the good. It's no secret that MySQL was planning to go public in the very near future. In fact, many folks have been preparing for us to operate as a publicly held company. And in some respects, what's changing here is that we will bypass our own IPO to be part of an... READ MORE

CMSWire asked me to be the first they interview for their brand new column Flash Quiz. If you ever wondered how much I sleep and whether I like fancy cars, check out Flash Quiz: Sandro Groganz Speaks.

Coverity Inc, a long time expert in code analysis, has announced their work with the US government Department of Homeland Security to indentify security and quality issues in 11 popular open source projects: Amanda, NTP, OpenPAM, OpenVPN, Overdose, Perl, PHP, Postfix, Python, Samba, and TCL. Coverity has been doing a mix of static and dynamic code analysis in the open source world for quite some time and I've always been impressed with what they've found. In particular, they did an extensive evaluation of the LAMP stack and MySQL a few years back which helped us identify some security risks which... READ MORE

I posted this at the new blog but it never hit Planet MySQL, so we’ll see if posting it here does the trick.

Learn all about it at http://www.mikehillyer.com/mysql/speaking-at-the-2008-mysql-conference-expo/

A

A

TechIQ, which focuses on the VAR IT channel business, has identified the top 10 open source companies they expect to succeed in 2008. It's a good article and although it includes some obvious choices, it also includes a few well-thought out surprises. So it's not your typical end-of-year round up. This one has some creative thinking behind it. I think there's a lot of potential for VARs to get behind the open source movement and help customers with implementations as well as integration of open source offerings. (Disclaimer: I admit that I blushed to see MySQL in the list. But... READ MORE