Lately, it has been popular on blogs and elsewhere to portray the relationship between open source and closed source as a non-fight.

• In The Beautiful Game, Bryan Kirschner (who leads research strategy for the Open Source Software Lab of Microsoft) blogs about the MySQL User’s Conference and shares his thinking about why Microsoft and MySQL are working together on a number of applications, including ADO.NET provider Interop, and a Visual Studio plug-in that enables developers to access MySQL data directly from VS.
• In The “it’s not us versus them” meme, Matt Asay (influential Open Source thinker and blogger) describes how Microsoft increasingly point out that “it’s not open source versus proprietary” meme. He argues that it would normally be the new player, not the incumbent player, who one should expect to use this type of argument.

Whatever the reason for anybody to claim it’s not us versus them, I think the winner is the end user — as long as the claim is backed up by actions.

For MySQL, let me say that we’ve humbly done our best to take actions. We’ve worked with Microsoft operating systems and applications since last century. Not long after the release of MySQL (originally under Solaris, then under Linux), the software was released under the Windows operating system. Furthermore, we released an ODBC driver coded in-house; as for connectors to many popular Open Source languages, they’ve been developed by the community, not by MySQL itself. And fast forwarding to this century, we beat Microsoft SQL Server by releasing an ADO.Net driver for MySQL Server quicker than MSFT themselves for MSSQL. This is for the good of the end user, who gets more choice and more opportunities inside the Microsoft ecosystem.

With Microsoft (through Port 25) being a sponsor at the MySQL Conference & Expo, and having met Bryan Kirschner and Jamie M. Cannon (both of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft), I am happy to see that Microsoft is starting to acknowledge MySQL’s importance for the Microsoft ecosystem. “As commercial software companies, MySQL and Microsoft share substantial common ground.”, Bryan says in his blog. There seems to be something positive to what MySQL can do for Microsoft customers, also from the perspective of Microsoft itself.

When it comes to Microsoft and MySQL working together, I think there is more in store for the end user. With official contacts established between the two companies, new ideas are getting floated. Some of them may fly. Expect to hear more later!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 19:21 and is filed under Connectors, MySQL, MySQL Users Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.