Because Sun loves their customers, Developers, employees, shareholders, and Dolphins... Sun just bought MySQL... This is very interesting as they put a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP (that's geek-speak for the the tech stack that Web Developer use. More definitions here.)....Just another participant in my nautical metaphor about who is navigating the treacherous waters of the rising digital tide...
Here is a relevant quote about the importance of the database from O'Reilly's famous "What is Web 2.0":
"Every significant internet application to date has been backed by a specialized database: Google's web crawl, Yahoo!'s directory (and web crawl), Amazon's database of products, eBay's database of products and sellers, MapQuest's map databases, Napster's distributed song database. As Hal Varian remarked in a personal conversation last year, "SQL is the new HTML." Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies, so much so that we have sometimes referred to these applications as "infoware" rather than merely software...This fact leads to a key question: Who owns the data?"
Here is a video explanation with the key players
