Fork me on GitHub

MySQL and SPARQL – A goodbye and a welcome

By Deepak Singh | Published: January 16, 2008

Woke up this morning to the following piece of news, which I still can’t make up my mind on

Sun has acquired MySQL for $1 billion. Tim O’Reilly, who happens to be on the MySQL board, is positivepositive about the move, while Glyn Moody has a mixed take, although his headline sounds ominous. Joe Landman also shares his thoughts

Glyn’s quite right though. Sun is buying its way into the LAMP stack. Like him, my biggest fear is Solaris sticking its nose in. I have written before that Sun should give up on Solaris and focus on hardware, ZFS, and the Java ecosystem (and now the MySQL side as well). Hopefully this will not impact the importance of the LAMP stack, nor the open source ethos of MySQL.

While MySQL was busy getting acquired the SPARQL. specification was formally published. SPARQL, a query language for the Semantic Web (RDF specifically), is a key piece of the Semantic stack. I hadn’t even realized that it was in draft status.

Technorati Tags: ,

This entry was posted in Computing, Semantic Web, Software & Internet. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
  • To be honest, I think your fear is short-slighted. As others have noted, I don't think Sun is foolish enough to alienate existing LAMP users who wish to continue to use Linux by somehow making MySQL only run on Solaris and to disregard it on other platforms.

    That said, there are a number of advantages that OpenSolaris has over Linux (and vice versa) and for those users who want to take advantage of the features in the former and run a so-called SAMP stack, I think that's a good thing. The community and market is big enough for both open-source operating systems to exist and be used.
  • I hope that from the Linux point of view, it will mean nothing more onerous than a tedious license agreement to read on installation, as is the case currently with Sun Java on Linux.

    What it bodes for the future success of MySQL, time will tell I guess.
blog comments powered by Disqus

  • Archives

  • Disclaimer

    All opinions on this blog are my own and do not reflect those of my employers, past or present