Sun Votes for Open Source

I managed to miss the acquisition in February, but this is really cool nonetheless.  Sun Microsystems paid $1 Billion for the commercial support vendor behind MySql (yes, the open source database).

What was the  reaction?

Sun Microsystems’s acquisition of MySQL was “a billion-dollar vote for the LAMP stack.” That’s how former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now senior vice president in Sun’s Database Group, characterized the deal during his keynote speech at this week’s MySQL Conference and Expo.

A billion dollar vote?  Daaang.

And what did Sun’s CEO have to say?

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz was on hand to confront critics of the merger. “Do you all want to know our secret agenda?” Schwartz asked the crowd. “It’s to serve the [open source] community. Each one of those folks represents an opportunity for Sun.”

You can read a better recap of the story here.

If embracing open source means standardizing on high quality ways of developing software, I wonder what the impact will be on the enterprises represented in the community.

They just might shift from competing on being able to build software (on time, on budget, etc) and instead focus on building innovative software for their business.  The difference is subtle, but the results could be profound.