Sun Microsystems recently announced the purchase of MySQL. In this interview the day of the announcement, OurSQL asks Brian Aker about what this means for customers, community, Sun and MySQL.
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These are the news that left me flabbergasted today. Sun announces an agreement to acquire MySQL for $1bn. I had heard rumors of an IPO and about MySQL going to launch a huge announcement some when this year. But this is much better than what I could ever imagine
Sun has an impressive background in open source development. Systems and applications such as OpenOffice, OpenSolaris or NetBeans, together with the Java programming language, have been developed by Sun. It is also one of the largest IT companies in the world and can bring a very strong global support network. But most importantly, with this move Sun is going to boost MySQL’s credibility in the corporate world, and open source’s credibility by extension.
As Sun’s CEO explains in his …
[Read more]The 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo is nearing, and I’ve still got unpublished notes from the 2007 conference! In a way, its a good thing - too much was published during conference time, its hard to keep track. Here comes my notes from a superb keynote by Guy Kawasaki, titled The Art of Innovation, presented at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2007.
… on Apple
- “Back then, sexual harassment was a good thing”
- Apple allowed first class travel as long as you worked for
Steve back in the day :-)
… on being a/pitching to a VC
A good test for entrepreneurs is: “Are you using MySQL”. Guy’s a
VC, he likes you to use cheap, highly available tools.
Make meaning - don’t go to a VC and say you want to make money. It means you’ve attracted the …
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(The Executive Summary: I left my job last week, and I start
working at The
Pythian Group on Monday. Go to their website if you’d like to
work with me, or with people just as knowledgeable as me.)
I get inquiries all the time about consulting. Folks are madly
searching for experienced MySQL DBAs. The lure of a new
environment is always tempting, however, working for any one
environment has its quirks. In October I realized I was coming up
on having worked 2 years at my job. That’s not a very long period
of time, but it certainly was long enough for me to learn the
environment and get stuck in a rut — mostly my rut was doing more
systems work than database work. More »
I have two talks in the coming few weeks, that I’m still madly writing. I’ve come to the realisation that writing talks, really does take a lot of time (when you have a deadline). Especially, if you’re doing it my style - everytime I write a slide, and find something missing in the Wiki, I go ahead and fix it. So its not actually talk writing I’m doing, but expansion of our online documentation, and keeping it in check. That takes time.
I just stumbled upon an excellent article where Marten Mickos (CEO of MySQL) gives some tips about how to become a disruptor in the software industry. Here is a short summary, though, as always, I recommend reading the whole interview.
Peter makes an interesting post about the MySQL company’s
trademarks at http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/10/26/mysql-support-or-support-for-mysql-mysql-trademark-policies/
The point is that Peter is not selling “MySQL Support” — he is
selling “Support *for* MySQL”. “MySQL Support” is the name of a
product that MySQL offers. Even if some other consulting company
used the name before the MySQL company ever did, MySQL still has
the rights to the name. More »
Its exciting to see Zimbra being purchased for USD$350 million, by Yahoo!. Exciting because its a great product, exciting because I use it daily, and I guess Satish & team (of over 100 employees) deserve a big pat on the back. The other exciting thing to note is that its got MySQL in its core, and if they’re pushing it out farther and wider now thanks to the Yahoo! purchase, all the better.
There are a few things that are unclear, though, even from their FAQ:
I was pointed to an article about how the “one size fits all” database model doesn’t work anymore — how Oracle, DB2 and Ingres were written so long ago, they’d have to be rewritten to meet the needs of today’s database users. Jacob Nikom pointed the article to me; apparently he contacted the author and started to explain how MySQL meets that criteria, but the author disagreed.
Read the article for yourself:
http://www.databasecolumn.com/2007/09/one-size-fits-all.html
Anyone else notice the irony of saying “all those other DBMS’s aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution, but this one is?” I think that MySQL comes the closest to a DBMS that is NOT “one size fits all”, given the multiple storage engines available. What other DBMS will allow you to use your Amazon S3 account as a table? What other DBMS will allow you to …
[Read more]What if last week’s announcement by MySQL had been the following?
Some major MySQL distributors have brought some issues to our attention. These distributors have been legally distributing the Enterprise version of MySQL to folks that do not have a MySQL support contract, without their knowledge or consent.
When a user installs an open source operating system and includes MySQL, should that user get the Community version or the Enterprise version? Since the source code was split back in October 2006, MySQL AB has felt that users should use the Enterprise version only if they intend to. We have made the source easily downloadable, so folks that want to use Enterprise, are able to use Enterprise.
However, given that distributors have been doling out Enterprise to unsuspecting users, we decided to change a few things. Firstly, we recognize that folks may be downloading Enterprise because they do not understand that Community …
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