[geeks] Sun to acquire MySQL

[Mark]

On 21 Jan 2008, at 23:26, Jonathan Katz wrote:

> On Jan 21, 2008, at 6:19 PM, Nadine Miller wrote:
>> And gives Sun a backup position (and possibly even a lever) since
>> Oracle
>> has been threatening to dump Oracle on Solaris for a while.  (If you
>> question the latter, why else crow about Linux being Oracle's primary
>> development platform?)
>
> Oracle on Sun isn't going anywhere; they have way too much invested
> (from both Sun's and Oracle's side.)

Indeed, Jonathon Schwartz has said as much[0], he also covered the  
matter of what happens to PostgreSQL in Sun, saying it'll still be  
there and still grow. His basic synopsis of the 'why' a paraphrase  
from Josh Berkus[1] - "Sun wants to be the leading provider of  
datacenters. Not just MySQL datacenters. Exactly.". So they want a  
finger in all the database pies, and to offer supposrt for all of  
them, so they get them all onside, meaning they can sell a solution to  
no matter what market the customer is coming from.

I think the strategy could be pretty smart, but could be pretty risky  
too. Having a pen in the garden with 4 snarling dogs in that all want  
each others lunch isn't without it's problems, and they can sometimes  
hurt each other or the master.

[0] Excellent Blog post: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/in_a_vortex

[1] http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/database/soup/archives/sun-acquires-mysql-21822


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