I wonder when the first guy at Sun will stand up and ask where the revenues are for all the stuff they've decided to give away? Or perhaps what the ROI for the MySQL purchase is going to be?

Along those lines, I see where Sun has approved more money down that particular rathole:

Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has unveiled Drizzle, a database project aimed at powering websites with massive concurrency as well as trimming superfluous functionality from MySQL.

Drizzle will have a micro-kernel architecture with code being removed from the Drizzle core and moved through interfaces into modules. Akers has already selected particular functionality for removal: modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, access control lists and some data types.

Someone should ask Schwartz exactly how he expects to recoup the $1B Sun tossed overboard at MySQL. Or perhaps they should suggest a plan of burning $1M in a bonfire - it would cost them less....

Update: This kind of reinforces my point. Sun has made it possible for anyone to buy a commodity x86 box, load it up with Sun software, and pay them nothing. You can call that a lot of things, but "intelligent business plan" isn't one of them.

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