For an executive who had just had his company bought for a cool billion a few months ago and was on the eve of announcing a major update to his business’ flagship database program, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now Sun Microsystems’ senior vice president for databases, didn’t look comfortable. Mickos had come to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Super Computing Center to explain that MySQL was not about to abandon Linux. His audience, the movers and shakers of Linux business and development circles, were not overly impressed.
The pro-Linux crowd of 200-plus were worried that now, with Sun in charge of MySQL, Sun’s focus would be on creating a SAMP (Solaris, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) software ecosystem instead of supporting the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) stack, which has enabled Linux to gain $21 billion worth of traction in the server market.