Wow, I wasn't expecting this one: Sun is buying MySQL: "the biggest news of the day is... we're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you're an industry insider, you'll know what that means - we're acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world's most popular open source database."

Sun Microsystems finally matters again. The company is buying MySQL, the open source database leader, for $1 billion.

Many distributions have what is called a "fixed" release. While they may have several names for it, it is simply a fixed release where several things happen...

his morning Sun Microsystems announced that it was purchasing MySQL AB for $1 billion, $800 million of which is supposed to be paid in cash. This is a huge deal in the open source community. Two minutes after I heard the news, I begged an invitation to the "no press" MySQL company meeting at which the announcement had been made, drove two hours to Orlando, and sat down for lunch with Sun vice president (and Java creator) James Gosling and MySQL AB cofounder David Axmark. After lunch I corraled MySQL CTO (and original MySQL creator) Michael "Monty" Widenius and MySQL chief database architect Brian Aker, and got their opinions about how the acquisition might work out and what it means for both companies.

From a Linux Developer point of view, when users are no longer developing with you...you’ve lost. Empowerment is key to a successful community in Linux. The day the community is no longer empowered to improve is the day the distribution dies. What kills empowerment? Helplessness. Despair. Inability.

MySQL and Solaris are both using an advanced tracing tool to smoke out performance problems, and Linux doesn't have anything like it.

One of the greatest tragedies of intellectual property law is how it generates intellectual confusion among successful businesspeople. Many are under the impression, even when it is not true, that they owe their wealth to copyrights, trademarks, and patents and not necessarily to their business savvy.

For this reason, they defend intellectual property as if it were the very lifeblood of their business operations. They fail to give primary credit where it is due: to their own ingenuity, willingness to take a risk, and their market-based activities generally. This is often an empirically incorrect judgment on their part, and it carries with it the tragedy of crediting the state for the accomplishments that are actually due to their own entrepreneurial activities.

IBM today announced that it will offer an integrated Open Collaboration Client Solution with support for Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system from Canonical Ltd. that is especially popular for desktops, laptops and thin clients.