All about the system administration and application development behind a local linux-based company
By now it’s been reported all over the internet that Sun is buying MySQL, AB for approximately $1 billion. This is either the largest or smallest news of the new year. As of 2005, MySQL’s revenue was $40 million, and according to Sun’s press release, they have about 400 employees. To me, this doesn’t seem that it justifies the $1 billion price tag, so Sun is buying them for reasons other than a straight return potential.
On the cynical side, they could be looking to build it up to a second oracle, with a small free version and requiring a purchase for any of the newer enterprise features. I doubt this is the case, as Sun should recognize that much of the MySQL appeal comes from its image as an open free program with the availability of rock solid support. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see MySQL Enterprise’s base prices (currently $600-$4000/server/year or $40,000/year for a site license ) go up a bit to help pay off Sun’s investment and close the gap with Oracle (~$40,000/CPU).
First of all, quite a few online disucssions have centered around “Why not postgres?” I think that this is the easiest question to answer: Regardless of the technical merits of each system, MySQL is currently the web application leader. Furthermore, Postgres isn’t a company, so it can’t be bought. Sure, Sun could announce that they are putting serious development resources behind postgres, and offering paid support options, or they could go the EnterpriseDB route and fork postgres into a commercial and commercially supported product, but neither of those give them the same control of a stable and highly adopted database product that owning MySQL AB does for them. More importantly, it doesn’t expose them to MySQL’s impressive customer portfolio.
By buying MySQL, Sun is showing that they’re interested in becoming more like Oracle and IBM, the enterprise consulting company. Since many of the larger and data intensive technology companies (Baidu, Google, Facebook, Ticketmaster, Dunn & Bradstreet) use MySQL, they are buying themselves ins to the who’s-who of technology, and just the companies that wouldn’t have previously been Sun customers (none have a need for Java, they tend to use whitebox clusters, etc) However, now that Sun owns MySQL, there’ll be the opportunity to sell complete solutions to enterprises based upon the LAMP stack.
Several concerns come to mind: Since Sun has a vested interest in Solaris and their own hardware, optimizations and new features may come to Solaris and Sun storage systems before it makes it to the other platforms, or we may end up with a whole set of features that only work with Solaris and/or on Sun hardware. Also, Mysql AB was a known. We could count on them to provide a steady stream of new features for both the paid and unpaid versions, reasonably responsive unpaid support via mailing lists, and excellent (if verbose) documentation. With Sun, we can expect all these things and more to be provided to paying customers, but it remains to be seen what will happen to the community version.
I’m actually happy to see Sun emerging as one more of the behemoth consulting companies, as that was starting to become somewhat of a duopoly, but I just hope it doesn’t come at the expense of fixing something that wasn’t broken (MySQL AB).
January 19th, 2008 at 9:48 am
On the PostgreSQL thing, Sun has been supporting it on Solaris for a while now and I believe they’ve made some significant contributions to the project. I am wondering how that will pan out now…