Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 75.165.41.202]
on February 04, 2008 12:50 AM
I can relate to the anxiety; this change does bring a lot of uncertainty. But I don't get this assumption of doom and gloom. I'm sure that you have heard of OpenOffice? :-) but you may not have realized that it was created by Sun after they bought $$ StarOffice and that they also have a paid license version?
Yes, Sun is struggling, it is hard to make money when you are giving so much away, and the bottom has fallen out of the hardware market with the predominance of commodity computers. You can argue this all you like, but from where I sit, now that Linux has captured mind-share, all other *nix are receding into the niche, including Sun's. I suspect they are trying to reinvent themselves as the next mega-database and office products company. mySQL has a successful business model which includes giving mySQL away under the GPL and selling support. It's not too different from what Sun was hoping to achieve with OpenOffice, the difference is that companies are a lot more likely to purchase support for a database then an office suite. Sun wants to see if they can scale it up to a higher level of market penetration. Seems reasonable to me. Also this is a good time to buy, with the current adoption and profitability trends mySQL's value is near certain to be increasing a lot. Seems like a sound investment to me. Wait much longer and it gets a lot more expensive. Also with the solidity of Sun's backing, companies can feel a lot safer about switching from MS SQL, thus accelerating growth even further and that's probably why mySQL sees this as an opportunity for them as well.
Perhaps too it was a defensive tactic, designed to protect all of us, consider the alternative, what would have happened if M$ had decided that they were going to buy mySQL in order to acquire the superior technology, and to get rid of a competitor at the same time. Can't happen, you say? anti-trust and all that. Well er let's see, there is MSN and MS Live but that somehow does not stop them from offering 44 billion for Yahoo. So what happened to anti-trust? Remember FoxPro?
I don't know about you, but I much prefer Sun to M$. Sun has proven themselves to be a responsible corporate citizen; whereas Microsoft seems intent on proving to us in every way possible that they are the opposite of anything good.
Disclaimer: I am not in any way associated with any of these companies, I do however use software from all of them, this is strictly my personal opinion based on publicly available information. codeslinger (compsalot.com)
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Sun buys MySQL for $1 billion
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 75.165.41.202] on February 04, 2008 12:50 AMYes, Sun is struggling, it is hard to make money when you are giving so much away, and the bottom has fallen out of the hardware market with the predominance of commodity computers. You can argue this all you like, but from where I sit, now that Linux has captured mind-share, all other *nix are receding into the niche, including Sun's. I suspect they are trying to reinvent themselves as the next mega-database and office products company. mySQL has a successful business model which includes giving mySQL away under the GPL and selling support. It's not too different from what Sun was hoping to achieve with OpenOffice, the difference is that companies are a lot more likely to purchase support for a database then an office suite. Sun wants to see if they can scale it up to a higher level of market penetration. Seems reasonable to me. Also this is a good time to buy, with the current adoption and profitability trends mySQL's value is near certain to be increasing a lot. Seems like a sound investment to me. Wait much longer and it gets a lot more expensive. Also with the solidity of Sun's backing, companies can feel a lot safer about switching from MS SQL, thus accelerating growth even further and that's probably why mySQL sees this as an opportunity for them as well.
Perhaps too it was a defensive tactic, designed to protect all of us, consider the alternative, what would have happened if M$ had decided that they were going to buy mySQL in order to acquire the superior technology, and to get rid of a competitor at the same time. Can't happen, you say? anti-trust and all that. Well er let's see, there is MSN and MS Live but that somehow does not stop them from offering 44 billion for Yahoo. So what happened to anti-trust? Remember FoxPro?
I don't know about you, but I much prefer Sun to M$. Sun has proven themselves to be a responsible corporate citizen; whereas Microsoft seems intent on proving to us in every way possible that they are the opposite of anything good.
Disclaimer: I am not in any way associated with any of these companies, I do however use software from all of them, this is strictly my personal opinion based on publicly available information. codeslinger (compsalot.com)
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