Episode 10 - Dvorak is wrong!

Chad mentioned John C. Dvorak's MySQL comments on Twit in episode 10. I think Dvorak is absolutly wrong. Sun isn't spending $1B to bury MySQL. Even if they tried, they couldn't. MySQL is an open source project that will continue to thrive as long as people keep demanding it.

What Sun wants are the big business support contracts that MySQL the corporation has with the huge users of MySQL. This has been a sucessful business model for other open source companies like Red Hat.

Sun is at a crossroads. They used to be a big proprietary hardware and software company, but with the sucess of open source software and cheap hardware, they need to reinvent theirselves or die. It looks like they are following the service model that IBM has been moving towards long before they spun their laptops off to Lenovo. You can see some of this new business model if you look at Sun's recent product offerings. Linux on Intel hardware rather than Solaris on SPARC.

I agree with Chad's comment that if Sun tried to bury MySQL, the project would just get forked and continue on. However, I think more interesting is that if Sun stopped supporting its MySQL customers, there would be a huge business oportunity there for whomever does.