Behold what Sun's $1B has purchased:

Meanwhile, all the cutting edge stuff (at least from the point of view of scaling) is happening outside Sun/MySQL and being integrated by OurDelta and even Drizzle. The OutDelta builds are gaining steam quickly and Drizzle is shaping up.

Read the whole thing, but here's the long and short of it: MySQL has forked such that you can get better bits without ever talking to Sun, much less paying them. Meanwhile, in order to justify the huge wads of cash they spent, Sun has to make the db run better on their own (poorly selling) hardware. It all adds up to a huge outflow of money, and no revenue to speak of on the other end. Jonathan Schwartz may be a hero to the open source community, but I suspect that Sun's shareholders might feel differently. Oh - and the Open Source community might be in for a rude awakening when Sun really needs to start cutting back, and they are forced to whack away the low/no revenue groups. Like MySQL.

Now Listening to: Path Of Thorns by Sarah McLachlan from: Mirrorball

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