The rumoured acquisition of Sun by IBM makes sense on many levels. IBM has always been a strong proponent of business-friendly open source and is probably more invested in Java than Sun itself. The indirect impact on recently-acquired MySQL is a bit personal for me, however.

Many moons ago, I worked in the IBM software lab in Toronto where DB2 UDB is primarily developed. I learned a great deal there, but something stirred within me, a desire for freedom and flexibility in software. I took a risk and moved to California, working for a number of start ups, believing that open source database technology (and software in general) was the wave of the future, and I wanted to work in companies that were willing to use OSS software.

To say the least, many of my then-current and former IBM colleagues that had taken cushy jobs with big companies to administer large DB2 installations, or were on track to do so, thought I was crazy. MySQL was a toy database, and PostgreSQL was just a research project! In retrospect I feel it was the right decision.

So, here we are, years later, and IBM may now end up owning MySQL.

On the positive side, I have no doubt of IBM’s commitment to open source and that they will continue to support MySQL with the tremendous resources it can bring to bear. It would be quite ironic if the Toronto lab had some people shift to MySQL development!

However, if IBM’s previous acquisitions are any indication, they will almost certainly push MySQL as a free “entry-level” database to a larger pool of customers and smooth the way for eventual upgrading to more expensive enterprise products. This is not inherently a bad thing, but it could translate into poor support and release-inflation (i.e. beta = alpha, GA = beta, etc) as a way to encourage captive customers to just bite the bullet and upgrade to DB2.

IBM may be able to squeeze quite a bit of profit out of MySQL in this way from enterprise customers who are used to this kind of abuse, but there are significant challenges:

They will need to go out of their way to convince skeptics like myself that quality and stability will not be compromised as MySQL gets integrated into IBM’s product offerings, otherwise MySQL users without deep pockets may begin defecting to postgres rather than be stuck with a key part of their infrastructure poorly-supported.

Then there is the still-unresolved problem of Oracle owning the maker of MySQL’s only viable transactional engine, InnoDB, an issue I wrote about last year when Sun acquired MySQL. With the release of the new InnoDB as a downloadable “plug-in”, Oracle has made it clear that they want to track and find as many of MySQL’s customers as they can.

Most important is that IBM will need to maintain MySQL’s reputation as the DB of choice for new web sites and other budget-conscious startups. Mindshare is everything. This is inherently difficult to track and acheive, because the next twitter will be developed by a few clever people who start up something for fun and just download all the OSS tools they need, based on what others before them did. Right now, typically, that’s a standard LAMP stack. If people starting up sites today begin to question the “M” part of LAMP (eg. swap postgresql for mysql), this effect on MySQL’s reputation and stature won’t be obvious for quite a while but it will be difficult to reverse.