If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that
for the past decade I’ve had a love-hate relation ship with Sun.

Sun has done a lot of good things in their open source journey such as MySQL, openOffice , Virtualbox and opensourcing Java. But on the other hand they had troubles with creating really organic opensource.

I’ve always wondered why a company that bought StarDivision because it was cheaper than buying the MS Office license keeps wasting money on building it’s own operating systems, albeit in a pretty open model, but with zero to no relevant community.

Yes I’ve ranted on their marketing boys and girls when they polluted forums I liked. But no I don’t want this to happen. (Slicing up Sun)

However I`m in fear it actually might happen, the funny thing is that I already mentioned the same idea in offline conversations during the last couple of months.

My Advice to Sun. : Stop putting money in things you can co-create with other organisations, if there’s only 2 features in your product that count for some people, contribute those 2 features to something bigger.
(That’s D-Trace and ZFS and the Linux Kernel I`m talking about in case you didn’t realise) Why keep throwing money down the drain ?

Also let Google, Percona and others contribute to MySQL, don’t keep it as closed as it is today. As after al it’s more Free software than it is Open Source, but it has a great community which I love to be part of .. and I hope for a long time to come..

I`m going to try to keep my mouth shut on this for a while.. as I think Jonathan is listening anyhow. If he was, he would have known that at some point in time when you step out of the shower and there is too much hair dropping from your skull every morning, it’s time to cut off the ponytail.. , not opensource it. I did that years ago.. and it’s growing much thicker again now.

My hair that is ..