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

January 21, 2008 | Comments: (0)

More on Sun's acquisition of MySQL

TAGS: Open Source

I thought I'd get a chance to do some more blogging on Sun's acquisition of MySQL last week, but I was focused internally at our company meeting, spending time with employees and working on our objectives for 2008.

Needless to say it was a fun, but exhausting week. We'd been working with Sun on the deal for several weeks, but only a handful of people knew about it. So there were about 400 very surprised employees Wednesday morning when we announced the news. It's a lot of information to digest and we wanted to make sure everyone got answers to their questions. The company meeting had been planned for 6 months, but we threw the team a curve when we asked them to accomodate some special speakers.

First of all we had Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz beamed in via satelite. (And maybe some folks thought Marten was just kidding until that point.) Then we had Rich Green on stage in person to talk about Sun's Software division. Jonathan and Rich did a great job helping people to understand Sun's culture. It's different from Sun in the 90's. Sun has become much more cross-platform, supporting Linux and Windows alongside Solaris, as well as Intel and Opteron processors in addition to Sparc. And Sun open sourced Java as well as Open Solaris.

I've blogged about some of those items in the past, but these were massive "whoda thunk it" changes at Sun in the last few years. It's a testament to Jonathan's vision as an open systems company. Their bet on open source is significant and I think that was ultimately what helped many employees understand the strength of this acquisition. It confirms Sun's position as the #1 open source vendor in the industry. And it means we can continue to take MySQL to the next level without having to worry about compromising the right long term decisions in order to make good quarterly decisions as a small company doing an IPO. Of course, financials still matter, but now its in the context of a much larger and more stable revenue stream.

Overall, I think the news was well received by our customers, partners, employees and shareholders. I received positive emails from many of our partners including folks at Alfresco, Zimbra, Zend, Hyperic, Mulesource, Intel, AMD, Red Hat and many others. I was particularly impressed with a nice email from Ken Jacobs of Oracle saying he looked forward to continuing to work with us as before. Ken is a class act.

In fitting with the MySQL culture, we ended our Wednesday morning announcements with a toast: Sun and MySQL execs singing the traditional swedish drinking song Helan GÃ¥r along with shots of chilled vodka for everyone in the room.

Posted by Zack Urlocker on January 21, 2008 08:05 AM

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