Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Integrating MySQL with Sun

February 26, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Integrating MySQL with Sun

TAGS: Open Source

We've now officially closed MySQL's acquisition by Sun this morning and I thought I'd make a few observations about the process. I've been through several acquisitions over the years, both on the acquiring and the acquired side, and so far, this one has gone the smoothest.

While Sun is obviously a much larger company than MySQL, the approach that the Sun execs and managers have taken has been professional and respectful every step of the way. Not once have I heard Sun employees say "This is the way we do things here." Instead, there has been a strong desire to make sure that MySQL can continue to operate "business as usual."

We will continue to release MySQL under the GPL license and support all mainstream platforms and languages just as we always have. Red Hat is still our most popular platform. PHP is our most popular language. There's no hidden agenda to migrate people to Solaris or Java or anything like that. If there's one thing that's clear with open source, it's about ensuring customers have freedom and choice. The good news is we now have even more resources to help us optimize performance for large scale operations and we can expand our reach into more markets.

To Sun's credit, they have demonstrated tremendous flexibility and agility with this acquisition. I'm sure there were times where they must have wondered "what's with these folks?" MySQL is a very passionate company and sometimes people can be, ah, rather outspoken.

A good example is how we've updated our Intellectual Property agreements. This is something we had been doing gradually at both companies. As MySQL was planning on going public we knew things would have to be updated any ways. Sun's IP agreements were traditional, big company 'we own everything' documents. Sun knew they also had to update their policies to be more open source friendly. After all, many employees (both at Sun and MySQL) also contribute to external open source projects in their spare time.

So working together, Sun and MySQL developed a far more flexible IP agreement and FAQ that covers most people's concerns. The Sun folks we worked with admitted that it might have otherwise taken 12 months to get these agreements updated. Instead they were completed in a matter of weeks. That's something we can all be proud of.

Over the coming weeks, we'll no doubt be looking for ways we can further integrate with some of Sun's key technologies and products to accelerate our roadmap and improve our scalability. We'll have more news in this area at the upcoming MySQL Conference & Expo, April 14-17 in Santa Clara.

As a result of the Sun acquisition we're seeing a dramatic increase in conference registrations. I expect that many of the tutorials will sell out, so if you want to make sure you get your first choice, I encourage you to register soon.

Posted by Zack Urlocker on February 26, 2008 08:56 AM

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