Presently, people need to get into quite a bit of code to link applications together. If they find an easy way to integrate databases directly via their java product, they have effectively accomplished a couple things.

1) Almost all the opensource applications on sourceforge.net would become one easily linkable application.

2) It would make their java software indispensable to the whole opensource market. Almost everyone would be spending time learning their software rather than Microsoft’s because businesses will demand the lower cost at start-up.

Presently, the thing that makes opensource less attractive to business owners is that they need to spend large amounts of money to link software because opensource applications are so specialized and do not do everything in one application. Otherwise you need to pay employees (cost prohibitive) to type the same information into several applications (unreliable). This is the reason (along with marketing) that makes many businesses still choose Microsoft over opensource.

For the businesses, this will be great. It provides the use of custom (better) opensource applications at little yo no upfront cost that can be easily linked so you only have to type the information into ONE application rather than duplicate it unreliably (by hand).

If you are a developer/company that sells business start-up packages, you have a couple options. Try to sell an expensive software like Microsoft that is much less expandable and much less configurable and only work on your own server with large upfront costs as well as expansion expenses. Or, you can set up a company with next to no cost just paying for service as you need it with all free software. Because everything is in cyberspace, you do not even need an IT department there on site (space saver), just somewhere in the world.

It almost becomes a no-brainer to choose open source controlled by Sun. If you don’t know it now and if I am correct, you had better start learning java if you are a developer.

I’m happy.
I think Sun plans to:
- bind JB/JPA to MySQL
- introduce EJBQL as OO query language
- introduce java triggers and stored procedures as bridge between java and PHP/Perl via SQL code.

It would be great!

From my long experience with corporate dealings: this deal is only good for the folks at MySQL getting a bag of cash. While they probably deserve it, there is nothing there for the rest of us, users and customers. There never is.

P.S.: Citing Staroffice as one of Sun’s Open Source credentials is a joke: does anybody besides Scott McNealy really use Staroffice? (His mother doesn’t count for an answer.)

I’m afraid of Sun. I see them mainly as “vi” and “NFS”. And SunOS. Gawd, what a nightmare. I still regard java as a slowpoke joke, open GPL or not or whatever. They gobbled up open office and it went to crap, at least in my mind. So, Sun: that’s crap, joke, and we all know about NFS. I think vi was Joy’s creation, right? So, bottom line, what has Sun ever truly created, in the inescapably large but not overly magnanimous sense? Nothing I can think of.

I hope Sun has the sense to leave MySQL alone and not change anything that would cram its square peg into Sun’s round hole. It will take much for Sun to undo, to my mind, its ruinous image. Imagine anything even remotely approaching the horror that Brian Williams pointed out above:

# Brian Williams Says:
January 16th, 2008 at 14:27

This is not good. I’ve been working as a Sun consultant for years and have realized that they do not have a clue to commercial software development. They fancy themselves propeller-heads trying to solve problems that don’t apply to 95% of their customers.

Yea, it won’t be long before mysql will have a Sun Package installer that assumes you are root on the machine and that you would be running zones if you wanted multiple instances. And for updates? Well, you’ll need to poke through sunsolve for that. That’s right, everything is managed like the OS. Ridiculous.

And o course, the obvious waffling on the support of various non-Sun OSes.

You had damn well better believe I’m already well into learning postgres. LAMP ==> LAPP?
These kinds of deals have never, ever in history, resulted in true benefit, long-lived.
I propose we immediately begin developing “ourSQL”.