Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Gartner on Sun's acquisition of MySQL

January 22, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Gartner on Sun's acquisition of MySQL

TAGS: Open Source

There's been a lot of positive coverage of Sun's acquisition of MySQL last week (with one or two odd-ball conspiracy stories). To me the most significant element is that Sun has long recognized the disruptive nature of open source and is now leveraging that power as part of their overall strategy.

Obviously, that's not new news. Sun has been doing this for several years with OpenSolaris, GlassFish, NetBeans, open sourcing Java, etc. The fact that both companies have bet on open source is key to the ongoing success of MySQL. I don't think MySQL would have ever sold to a company that was not "open-source compatible". What would be the point?

In some ways Gartner's analysis of the acquisition is among the most insightful. It's a strong vote of confidence since it speaks not just to the open source community but to mainstream IT:

The MySQL purchase immediately casts Sun in the role of a major open-source database management system vendor with heterogeneous operating system solutions....

MySQL's largest user base resides on Linux, with the next largest user base residing on Windows. This will enable Sun to:

- Attract more Linux and Windows users as Sun customers
- Position itself more heterogeneously and shift its focus from primarily supporting Solaris-based (SAMP) systems to offering more inclusive support for Linux-based (LAMP) systems
- Demonstrate its willingness to support a stack on other operating systems in addition to Solaris
- Exploit more market and revenue-generating opportunities by reaching large MySQL users (for example, Facebook and YouTube), who do not overlap with the Solaris installed base

It's not a long report, but its well worth reading. As I've said before, Sun's move is a big vote of confidence not only in MySQL but in Open Source in general.

Posted by Zack Urlocker on January 22, 2008 03:17 PM

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