In what I see as a very strange change, Sun Microsystems now owns the open source database system MySQL. They were sold to Sun for one billion dollars, which isn’t the IPO that many people were expecting from the company.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote about the purchase on his blog.

MySQL is by far the most popular platform on which modern developers are creating network services. From Facebook, Google and Sina.com to banks and telecommunications companies, architects looking for performance, productivity and innovation have turned to MySQL. In high schools and college campuses, at startups, at high performance computing labs and in the Global 2000. The adoption of MySQL across the globe is nothing short of breathtaking. They are the root stock from which an enormous portion of the web economy springs.

Pretty much every major PHP application I have used needs MySQL databases to function, so this is probably a smart move for Sun, but I have to wonder what this will mean for the software going forward.

A big thanks to TechCrunch for the heads up.