Sun/MySQL Revisited

Now that we've gotten past the initial excitement of the Sun/MySQL transaction, a little reasoned analysis is in order. Fortunately, somebody has time to do this.

A couple of interesting points:

• This acquisition places Sun "at the center of the Internet" (their words), which makes sense since MySQL is very popular with Internet companies and startups. It is less exciting to the BI world - PostgreSQL seems to be the open-source choice there. I'm not quite sold on this argument from the BI perspective - I'm optimistic that MySQL will become more pervasive because of Sun's financial backing.
• This acquisition could also mean that Sun is positioning itself as an "alternative stack" for infrastructure architecture, with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) going up against Microsoft's .Net architecture. I'm all for this, only if it simply keeps Microsoft on its toes, but it also makes me nostalgic for the mid-90s when Sun and Microsoft were routinely at each others' throats.

Good times...good times...