Two major acquisitions in today's news.

First, Sun Microsystems, (not to be confused with the actual Sun, which has a rather lower page rank than Sun Microsystems despite the fact that the nuclear fusion inside its core is the indirect source of all the energy, and thus life, on Earth,) has bought MySQL AB for $1B.

MySQL AB owns the copyrights to most of the code behind the MySQL database. This is interesting because Sun has been doing quite a bit to promote PostgreSQL as an alternative to MySQL recently. (PostgreSQL supposedly scales better than MySQL, and has more features, while MySQL is supposedly more lightweight. Both PostgreSQL and MySQL are open-source solutions, and we interviewed Jason Potanski of the Citizendium project about why Citizendium chose PostgreSQL instead of MySQL.)

But the biggest thing to come out of it might be a simplification of the licensing issues associated with MySQL. The way I understand it, MySQL AB released the code for MySQL under both a proprietary license and the GPL. MySQL AB then claimed that if you wanted to use MySQL as the database for your proprietary application without releasing the source code to it, it was in violation of the GPL and that you should instead buy the proprietary license. Of course, the problem was that MySQL wasn't part of the application itself, it was just the database that the application ran on, and people were just using MySQL's protocols.

Sun has done well with the licensing terms of its many other open source projects (OpenOffice.org, Solaris, Java…) and perhaps they might re-release the MySQL code under terms such as the LGPL (which allows for proprietary applications to dynamically link to LGPL code,) which would end the legal issues.

NetQoS actually uses MySQL in many of our network performance monitoring products, so this is big news for us.

The other big announcement is that Oracle, not to be confused with Gloria Foster, who played The Oracle in the first two Matrix movies, has bought middleware provider BEA, not to be confused with Bea Arthur… this joke has run dry, hasn't it?

Anyway, BEA Systems was bought for $8.5B, in a second round of offers, further consolidating Oracle's middleware offerings. The most interesting commentary seems to be coming from BEA employees who commented on Slashdot's earlier story on the rejection of the $6.7B offer from Oracle.

How do you think these acquisitions will affect enterprise IT? Feel free to leave a comment.