So I'm not happy right now ... just woke up to an IM on my screen that Sun is buying MySQL. Look what Sun did to Java. Good or bad move for the developers out there?

Cheers

And for those who don't have the link, http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/01/1...cquires-mysql/

What did Sun do to Java? I (obviously mistakenly) believed that Sun co-developed Java. Am I wrong here?

As long as MySQL remains a freebie, I don't see an issue. But if they try to turn it into a fee-based DB, it will destroy an excellent DB.

Sun Microsystems developed Java. It was originally intended to be a system for home automation. Most people do not know this factoid. It failed at that.

In the late 1990s, many pundits claimed that Java was going to take over and dominate the Web. For a brief time, JSP sites were popular. It failed at that.

Then, Java applets were going to add wonderful features to web sites. It failed at that.

It did, however, find a niche with enterprise systems and works well for that application.

IMHO, Java has always been a resource pig. It is inherently slow and that is why it has never dominated the Internet.

BTW, for those of you that think that there is a relationship between Java and JavaScript. There is none. Java was developed by Sun. JavaScript was developed by Netscape. JavaScript was originally called LiveScript. It was modeled after Java and renamed to JavaScript because Netscape thought they could ride the wave of popularity with the language (Java) that at the time was predicted to be the dominant web language.