Way to go Jonathan

Three weeks ago Milking The GNU was  suggesting to SUN a few directions for MySQL. They were articulated around 4 messages:

1. Give the  business of dealing w/  large customers customers  to RedHat
2. Plug MySQL into the cloud so that to tackle with the long tail and beat up ORCL and MSFT
3. Keep MySQL community happy and growing
4. Start everything quickly so that to mitigate those bad Q3 numbers

Well, it took less than a month  for SUN to react. Here is a dramatized version of the answers implicitly given by Jonathan at the light of recent SUN's announcements:

1- I'm going to keep the RedHat business for myself, we can handle that. Sorry MTG but I can't let it go  when my Enterprise systems sales are slowing down that much. Plus RedHat is the common  enemy here, ok? Anyway SUN has enough friends going out of the MySQL closet that I can afford announcing deals like that every other month or so.

2- Clouding for the mass? I'm willing to give it a try but with a twist: Amazon and Open Solaris. That way I'm killing 4 pigeons (yup) with one stone, well one cloud:

• I can promote OpenSolaris (w/ ZFS .... argh, I can't let go of ZFS. So good)  in a way which is non-threatening to Linux.

• If the deal with Amazon proves successful I can always build a few farms around a handful of  Constellations later on (but I'd rather use  blades instead)

• Going into deal w/ Amazon wasn't hard (they need the buzz anyway)  and  I can announce a cloud dance  right away w/o launching any costly program

• Everything which is not quite open source ready in MySQL is not an obstacle anymore since I can patch it within the intimacy of  Amazon's cloud (if I may say)

3- As to  MySQL community I'm going to show good will and release a few more things as open source so that I can legitimately say that all SQL core is now open source.

4- Yup, I know those Q3 numbers are not good.  But hey I'm not alone, it's a whole US Economy slowing down. By the way MTG, how did you find out about our Q3?

Ok Jonathan, that's clearly the right direction but we also need a few more things here: How do you keep the community of open source developers growing? As Monty said on this blog: There are very few successful projects with closed source components that have an active community

Here are 2 suggestions:

• You need to offer open source developer a playground (OpenSolaris or Linux)  for cloud computing experiment: remember this idea of an everlasting summer of cloud computing?

• This could be an opportunity to have the community forgetting about the Indiana/OpenSolaris mess:  show us you are better than RedHat and  that you can release control. Give back the name OpenSolaris to the community, even so you've lost Roy Fielding.

 

Isn't leveraging goodwill better than amortizing it?

 

Comments

[Leonid S. Knyshov]

I was at that announcement and at the pre-announcement as well. I believe GigaOm got the first credit at the pre-announcement as it happened live on-stage during his interview of Jonathan Schwartz.

Let's not discount Sun's http://www.network.com cloud computing platform that has been in existence for a very long time.

I talked with Sun's people extensively at the event and the message they are radiating is "We want to help startups in any way we can". Let's just say the offers are compelling enough for me to consider OpenSolaris as my next platform.

[Roy Schestowitz]

We ought to be more gentle with and towards Sun. They bring a lot to FOSS (need anyone mention OOo?). Having spoken to Marten add Simon, you can see they're pressured from above (shareholders too). I've reached the conclusion that it's better to listen or instruct, not criticise or slam. Not with Sun anyway... Anything that looks like civil wars (cue McPherson) can be used against us, i.e. an ammunition against FS.