Based on one of the comments made to this post yesterday, I think I wasn't clear. The problem Sun has with MySQL isn't that they are expanding the closed source nature of it; it's the reason why they have to do it. They massively over-paid for that product, and that overpayment has left a large hole that needs to be filled. Who's going to fill it? Why. the MySQL user community, that's who. Don't expect to see anything useful released into the open stream by Sun, because their inability to make a rational purchase decision has precluded that. Had they made a reasonable offer, they wouldn't be dealing with this. But they didn't, and they are.

I mean seriously - what kind of idiot pays $1B for a company with $50M in annual revenues? Especially given this:

Of the company's bottom line, Mickos said, "Profitability isn't a specific goal yet, but we aren't burning cash. We go a bit above breakeven, a bit below breakeven."

So Sun tossed $1B at a break-even business. I wonder what the shareholders think of that?