A Linux Year in Review: Sun's Very Big Buy

Rounding up the top stories in the open source world starts with one very big deal.

Some might argue it was a middling year of news about open source and the Linux operating system. Whatever the sentiment, 2008 proved another year of solid growth and new releases for open source and Linux vendors.

In our week-plus look at the top stories, trends and themes of 2008, we pause to look at how some of them played out with vendors and end-users.

Sun Buys MySQL

Sun's $1 billion acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL was one of the biggest open source stories of the year. The deal, announced in January, closed just over a month later on February 26th.

The deal put MySQL at the forefront of Sun's database plans, shaking up its relationship with the open source PostgreSQL database and losing their PostgreSQL lead.

The acquisition also inspired some closed source hysteria when Sun pre-announced the release of MySQL 5.1 in April. As it turns out, MySQL 5.1 was substantially delayed and did not get released until December.

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20 great Windows open source projects you should get to know

No one loves to pay crazy per-user licensing fees, not to mention 15- 22% annual support residuals. (And no one loves the endless, mind-numbing meetings with non-technical financial folks trying to pry budget for these tools from their clenched fists.) So today we're going to discuss tools that are free. However, we are not naming them to this list of "great" tools simply because they cost nothing. These are some of the best lesser-known tools out there.

Of course, whenever we speak of great open source Windows projects we need to acknowledge the obvious players. These are the ones that have crossed over to the mainstream and have given paid software a run for its money. We all know them: OpenOffice.org, Firefox, MySQL, Xen, JBoss, and SugarCRM. These are what I like to refer to as the superstars of Open Source for Windows.

But you don't need me to tell you about the superstars. Instead, I have tested and compiled together a list of 20 great open source projects for Windows that will appeal mostly to the management and maintenance of your network. Some of these tools are just for the desktop and some are just for fun -- because happy IT folks are good IT folks. (They are not locking everyone out of the network while sneaking into the server room with a sledgehammer and … oh, come on! Admit it, I can't be the only one to have had that fantasy!) But enough of my outlandish ranting.

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Will market reject Sun’s open source vision?

Matt asks today whether open source will save Sun Microsystems.

Good question. But it depends on what we mean by open source. (Copies of this lovely poster are for sale at eBay.) And what we mean by saving.

As I noted here in January, while Sun sits at the bottom of the open source incline, having embraced GPL licensing, it actually sits near the top of the open source development incline.

This means Sun’s projects are essentially proprietary efforts. Sun decides the strategy, Sun controls the code releases. Sun “owns” mySQL, and takes that ownership seriously.

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