So, if IBM acquires Sun (WSJ article), what is the future for MySQL?

A bumper CAOS Links rounding up the news and views from the festive period, including: Red Hat revenue up 22% in 3Q. Alan Cox departs for Intel. Evolving open source business strategies. The commercialization opportunity around OpenOffice.org. And more.

Official announcements
Red Hat Reports Third Quarter Results Red Hat

OpenLogic Survey Highlights Enterprise Perspectives on Open Source Application Servers OpenLogic

Asianux Concludes Triumphant Year, Welcomes Fifth Member Asianux

News articles
The future of open source …

Back in October last year a corporate accountability group called As You Sow attempted to persuade Oracle to detail its commitment to open source by publishing an Open Source Social Responsibility Report.

Oracle resisted the proposal but did promise to share more details on its use of open source in the next version of its Oracle’s Commitment social responsibility report. I just noticed that the renamed Oracle Corporate Citizenship Report (Pdf) was recently published (in late November as far as I can make out) and does indeed include a section on Oracle’s commitment to open source.

In the section “Open Source and Accessibility” Oracle notes that …

IBM picks Ubuntu for virtual desktop. Nokia acquires Symbian and prepares for open source. SourceForge gets a new CEO. Microsoft finds some old TCO numbers down the back of the couch. And more.

Official announcements
IBM and Business Partners Introduce a Linux-Based, Virtual Desktop IBM

Novell Reports Financial Results for Fourth Fiscal Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2008 Novell

SourceForge Appoints Scott L. Kauffman President and Chief Executive Officer SourceForge

…

MySQL 5.1 reaches GA. But is it ready for production deployments? SpringSource launches commercial version of Apache Tomcat. BusinessWeek focuses on open source business models and open source in the downturn. And more.

Official announcements
MySQL 5.1 Downloads — Generally Available (GA) release for production use Sun Microsystems

SpringSource Launches tc Server; Continues to Redefine Application Server Market SpringSource

Open Solutions Alliance Appoints New President, Announces New Leadership Team Open Solutions Alliance

…

A busy week for Sun includes new product releases and an annual shareholders’ meeting. Microsoft tries to unseat open source with BizSpark for entrepreneurs. Who is making money from open source? Obama: Open source President? And more.

Press releases
IBM, Sun Microsystems Launch ODF Toolkit Union To Grow Adoption, Community and Software Innovation Sun Microsystems

Sun Unveils New Systems And Storage Solutions For MySQL Sun Microsystems

Microsoft Jump-Starts Global Entrepreneurs With BizSpark Microsoft

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Open-Xchange raises Series B funding. The FSF enables Wikimedia’s potential move to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. The “Bilski” decision and software patents. Mindtouch reports revenue growth. And more.

Press releases
Open-Xchange Closes Series B Venture Funding of $9 Million Open-Xchange

OASIS Members Form Committee to Advance Interoperability and Conformance of OpenDocument Format (ODF) Applications OASIS

FSF Releases New Version of GNU Free Documentation License Free Software Foundation

Federal Court Issues “Bilski” Decision Software Freedom …

CA and IBM, two of the so-called Big Four in systems management software, announced this week a federated configuration management database (CMDB) system for interoperability of their software. Something like this comoing from two of Big Four (BMC, CA, HP and IBM) wouldn’t normally hold much meaning for open source players such as GroundWork, Hyperic and Zenoss, but it actually does for a couple of reasons.

First, part of the technology that CA and IBM are using to link up their systems management software, which allows it to share information between the two CMDBs, is actually open source software itself from the Eclipse Cosmos Project. CA and IBM said the Eclipse Cosmos software accelerated implementation of the CMDB Federation (CMDBf) specification and the two vendors plan to contribute code …

A classic Morecambe and Wise comedy sketch from the 1970s sees Andre Previn criticizing Eric for playing all the wrong notes while attempting the Greig Piano Concerto. Morecambe responds that he is in fact “playing all the right notes. But not necessarily in the right order.”

I was reminded of the sketch this morning while reading BusinessWeek’s article on the potential perils facing open source vendors today. It seems to ask all the right questions, but not necessarily in the right way.

The report suggests that while industry giants such as IBM, HP, Oracle and Intel stand to benefit from open source software, investor impatience could spell trouble for open source …

ZDNet and its sister sites ran an interesting story yesterday indicating that IBM might be preparing to release its DB2 database under an open source license. If true, it would be a fascinating turn of events that would have a significant impact on the database industry. Unfortunately, it’s not.

I was immediately suspicious when reading the initial story. For a start it quotes a UK IBM executive: IBM’s UK director of information management software, Chris Livesey. With all due respect to him, if IBM was even hinting at open sourcing DB2, it would surely be rolling out the big guns.

Additionally, I’ve had briefings in the last couple of weeks with both IBM’s data management and open source executives, neither of whom thought to mention open sourcing DB2. That didn’t rule it out entirely of course.

Then there was what …