Depending on your point of view this is either really good news or the most worrying development in open source for a long while, Sun Micro have purchased the MySQL.

At first glance this looks like a good situation, Sun are already one of the biggest players in the open source market, they develop Open Office the open source alternative to Microsoft Office, Java is now under the GPL and they have NetBeans IDE. I just hope Sun don’t mess this up, MySQL is an integral part of the LAMP package (or even XAMPP in Windows environment) a completely open source web server running on a combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. I wonder though whether Sun are setting themselves up to go against Microsoft, they already have Open Office to rival MS Office. Maybe they see MySQL as an opportunity to rival MSSQL.