An interesting move – and for most of you thinking “this doesn’t affect me” I can tell you you’re dead wrong. You see over the past couple years, MySQL has become the back end database for a good deal of the web. If you’re CEO doesn’t have his own Gulfstream, chances are that some of your mission critical applications and quite probably your own website is using MySQL for something, if not everything.

I’ll withhold judgment on the whole thing for now. There’s more important issues here.

You see, we’ve come to the point that Open Source solutions, the LAMP solutions are winning out over enterprise solutions. The days when you needed an Interwoven or Vignette CMS system, constructed over an incredibly expensive Oracle database, running on servers the size of refrigerators are over. IBM realized this and embraced PHP. Sun has bought MySQL. The message is out.

Back in the day, the open source stuff was consider the province of the bootstrapper. Now the bottom tier is reaching up and its pressuring not just the middle level systems, its challenging the staid old favorites of business. MySQL 5.0 has many of the features that had kept the earlier versions out of the enterprise, such as stored procedures.

If you are running a business, you owe it to yourself to keep an eye on open source solutions, especially before buying any big, proprietary system.