Google has just announced their alternative to Amazon’s s3 called ‘App Engine’. 

I think that if this is successful it will provide a shift in some of the basic web development economics and practices, even more than Amazon’s s3 has.

why?
- Small hosting providers (ones that offer a shell account for $12/month) will be marginalized. why pay for something when you get it for free?

- M&A. It will create a 3rd platform to develop on. you currently have LAMP and Windows. The google app engine provides a 3rd. The major difference is you can’t buy it. If we acquire a company who runs on this platform we have 2 choices. continue paying google for the infrastructure, or redevelop it onto LAMP. of course this suits google as their integration costs are lessened. Google might provide a ‘open source’ version of their infrastructure.. but I doubt it.

- …

Kaj Arnös announced today the create of 2 separate mysql products.

a ‘enterprise’ and a ‘community’ one.

this is exactly what redhat did a couple of years ago with it’s creation of ‘fedora’.

the thing i’m not sure I like is the following

Community users get new features at no-cost to them — funded by paying customers that says guinea pig to me.

don’t get me wrong.. I’m not complaining .. MySQL has provided a excellent data source for many a year for next to nothing for most people, and I am grateful.

I’m more interested in how they can push more people into their enterprise product, when the community one is pretty damn good. The way redhat did it was to introduce lots of change into fedora. New versions with new features were constantly being introduced in a 3-6 month time window.. much too fast for a …

I actually think it will be business as usual for MySQL. and that oracle will continue to licence it to them for the long term.

Why?

well.. there are other technologies which are available to MySQL to choose from.

They have a year or so they have before their existing licence runs out in which they can adapt the codebases of the offerings to fit their model, and make the improvments required to match the features currently offered in InnoDB. (or even get it to do 80% of the features with a promise of future innovations)

Where can they look?

• Berkely DB (yes I know they have this as an option already)
• Postgres
• FireBird
• NuSphere’s Gemini
• CA’s Ingres
• Gigabase

I’m sure there are more.. I don’t follow the space that closely.

Brian & Monty are smart guys, I’d even hazard a guess that they have some …