Monday April 20, 2009 -- Oracle has announced plans to by Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, a 42% premium on last week's closing price.
This has immense implications for the open source database industry because Sun owns MySQL, which dominates the free open source database market. It could be worthwhile to Oracle to simply shut down MySQL or at least subvert its use in favour of Oracle databases. Even though MySQL is open source, and others can use the code to make derivative open source versions (fork the code), Sun and Oracle's ownership of InnoDB could give it effective control over MySQL since this is the database's primary storage engine.
REF: http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13523522&source=features_box_main
Is Joyent down? I can't reach http://joyent.com, http://support.joyent.com, or their emergency phone number, 415-289-0806. Maybe it's just me? I first noticed when our website went down, and it could also affect some of our clients!
It is weird. People in Canada and Silicon Valley could reach our site, http://eastagile.com, hosted on Joyent. But we could not reach any of their infrastructure from Vietnam. Then a friend pointed out that a large number of fiber lines were recently cut in Silicon Valley by vandals, and that traffic was being rerouted in the meantime. It might be that the routes from Vietnam were affected by this.
