Sun Microsystems bought MySQL AG for 1 billion dollars. MySQL has so far been the clear leader in open source database solutions. It’s MySQL has been the backbone of almost all websites in the past years, and puts the M in LAMP. The fact that Sun bought MySQL shouldn’t be to alarming, since Sun has openly supported open source in the past years. But, is the MySQL ownership change going to affect its further development?

MySQL has been free for years, although it made some money selling support subscriptions, but not nearly as many as there are MySQL users. The open source model is certainly a hard mouthful to swallow, especially in some cases. MySQL has a lot of users, and a community that grows on a daily basis. Now that it’s become Sun’s ownership, the company will have a great population of users to offer its other products to. Gordon Haff wrote an article on this on News.com, in which he discusses some implications of the deal.

On the one hand, MySQL will surely benefit from having a system as powerful as Sun Microsystems behind it. This should make a lot of desired development take place, and sooner too. On the other hand, there is the possibility that MySQL will simply be used as means to offer other products that require license purchase. What I’m hoping for is further development of MySQL, bringing it on level with Oracle, but still keeping it free. Sun certainly has the means to do this. Well, one can hope…

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