You know, at the end, as in LAMPREY...

Funny now open source and the net economy is running like a truck the rest of the business world is falling apart some connection there maybe.

I'm actually looking forward to Sun-rolled native installs of MySQL for Solaris. Err, although admittedly I rarely use any of the native packages, preferring to compile my own, but that could change.

In any case, I'm a staunch Solaris advocate. Just something about it has grabbed hold of me and won't let go. I beat the hell out of my Solaris boxes and they don't budge. Love them!

Nice to hear everyone still blurting out "My Sequel", and then correcting themselves.

I am not sure of the background of MySQL, or how "open source" it is, but I do gratefully rely on it for all the sites I run.

But for this amount of money, are the days of it being open source numbered? Is it like that little programme you love that starts off open source, then becomes "lite" and eventually charged?

Yes, can't wait for Sun to bundle it with Solaris, then we can see if they get hit with an EU unbundling motion from Oracle.....

MYSQL made $50M in 2006 and $53M in 2007, does Sun expect that revenue to come close to the money they will lose because they are now Oracle's competitor?

The only acquisition Sun has been successful at is Cray (The E10K) and Afara (the niagara chip).

Software, storage, x86 server acquisitions have all been a disaster.

Stop the madness. Remember when the 4 to 1 stock reversal was the ticket to

get the shareholders more value? Well it looks like the shareholders are trying to

get whatever they can and run.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=JAVA&t=3m

If you can get MySQL support as part of a Sun Support contract, then the danger MySQL represents, in the minds of IT support, is reduced considerably.

Some measure of the 'renegade' LAMP projects in an organization can now migrate from 'low-tier' hardware and software to 'upper-tier' stuff, since IT won't be actively repelling them. Sun thus recaptures some sales lost to 'free' products.

Further, some latent demand that up to now has been unmet due to fear of the perceived support downside of LAMP is freed, generating new requirements for 'official' IT services.

Pretty obvious. Whether there's $1Billion of value remains to be seen of course.

The 'Web Economy'? Well, it's much more pleasant to talk of such things rather than the insecurity of IT support in the enterprise.

The software as a service angle only makes sense if Sun's future 'cloud' can't use the 'free' dbms, Postgres, that they already have packaged, or that Sun's license fees to MySQL AB would have exceeded some good fraction of the purchase price, neither of which seems sensible.

Tux, because LAMP has been and will continue to be an essential component of the expanded market in which Sun's purchase of MySQL AB otherwise wouldn't have occurred.

"It has been like walking around in a candy story"

Sounds like Mickos has been reading too many stories where the sherbet dip uncovers the liquorice allsort as the perpetrator of a gruesome crime.

Good work guys - really enjoying these shows. Working for a website where almost our entire public facing infrastructure is open source (LAMP/JBoss/Echo2/Hippo CMS) it's good to have something like this that gives a broader overview of this area of our industry.