Give away software and make $1 Billion
Today Sun Microsystems announced they are buying the Open Source database company MySQL for $1 Billion. This is being heralded by many in the Open Source community as a great thing. So giving away free software can make you a lot of money. 
But what does this mean to all the people doing marketing on the Internet?
Initially not a lot.
MySQL is the database that most people are using for tools like wordpress or other content management systems. It is part of the LAMP stack which stands for Linus, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. This stack allows the creation of dynamic sites, like blogs using tools like wordpress. This makes it much easier for people to create and maintain their websites without having to learn the details of HTML, stylesheets, and javascript to get fancy websites.
Sun Microsystems has long been in the open source and unix business. They started as a workstation company and grew to be one of the top Unix and Open computing platforms in most commercial businesses worldwide. They have always embraced Open Source but have done more in the last 5 years. This move continues their interest in open source.
The good news for Sun and MySQL is that this has the potential for taking MySQL into a lot more commercial businesses as an enterprise class database. MySQL has a fairly good reputation, but CEOs were somewhat reluctant to put this in Mission Critical systems because of the possible support issues. But with Sun to stand behind the database, you may see more of this going in to replace smaller Oracle, DB2, and Sybase installations.
The question is - Is Sun really ready to be a software company. They grew up a hardware company under Scott McNeally. Now with Jonathan Schwartz at the helm of Sun are they poised to be a software company? Jonathan came to Sun when Sun purchased StarOffice. Which at the time was a open source product that competed with Microsoft Office. So, based on Jonathan's background, chances are pretty good.
Right now, Sun is saying they want to continue to support the MySQL community and stay true to its roots. But, will the pressures to make MySQL more enterprise ready take away from its roots? I think we will see some merger pains, probably in two or three years, but I don't think the Open Source community, of which we play a huge role in, will allow Sun to screw it up too much.
In general, this is a huge win for open source because it continues to strengthen the Open Source market. This is good for us as I think you will continue to see companies creating products in this space. This will continue to help keep costs down and continue to provide the small online business community with inexpensive and quality products that we can use to grow our businesses.
