GOC

The Sun Microsystems (News - Alert) $1 billion purchase of MySQL is a little bit like the AT&T $1 billion investment in global infrastrucure: both are a sort of "plumbing" that makes modern applications work, and upon which revenue-generating services are created.

 

As Sun CEO Johanthan Swartz puts it, "We're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP."

 

LAMP is the acronym for the major components in the enterprise open-source software stack: the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, MySQL database and PHP, or sometimes Perl or Python, which are other important scripting languages.

 

So why is this important? "Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the Internet," says Schwartz. "No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS."

 

And is what Sun hopes it now has done: put itself at the center of high performance platforms for the Web economy. The logic is that MySQL is the most popular platform on which modern developers are creating network services. And network services are the future.

 

Says Schwartz: "CTOs at startups and Web companies disallow the usage of products that aren't free and open source."

 

On the other hand, more traditional CIOs disallow the usage of products that aren't backed by commercial support relationships.

 

So Sun has to create a complex ecosystem including "free" software and "paid" support to create a sustainable business model on open source. Some users have more time than money, and forms the core of the developer community. Then there are those users with more money than time, enterprise users to be specific.

 

"To win in the long run, you have to win on both sides of the spectrum, with the same product," says Martin Mickos, mySQL CEO.

 

As it has in the past, Sun will operate "at arm's length" with mySQL, supplying enterprise support while allowing mySQL to do what it as to do in the free software community.

 

Note the phrase "open source operating system for the Internet." Some might use the term "cloud computing," or "network-based computing." Make no mistake: the shift to Web-based applications is a clear challenge to the desktop computing and PC operating system model. And that of course is a concern for a certain Redmond, Washington-based company.

 

To be sure, Microsoft (News - Alert) now thinks it can compete and win in the enterprise customer segment even against emerging "software as a service" providers; against the consumer-focused gadget providers as well as Google (News - Alert) and others in the consumer-based advertising space. All the while sustaining its desktop operating system and applications business.

 

But there's a clear nexus here between the viability of Web-based applications and the necessity of high-quality, high-availability broadband networks. Hence a billion here; a billion there.