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Recently Sun, founded in 1982, acquired MySQL; in a deal that signifies the impact open-source software can and has had on the PC community. Sun, the California headquartered corporation, is home to over 34,000 employees and boasts a powerful reputation of supporting open-source software. The $1 billion dollar acquisition of MySQL adds another strong weapon to Sun's impressive list of applications including Java, Open Office, and the free operating system Solaris. MySQL, a free program used to provide database solutions in web programming, is a popular application used by a wide variety of websites (Wikipedia.org is a MySQL powered website).

What is interesting about MySQL, and what other open-source applications in the past have managed to accomplish, is its supreme functionality accompanied by its compatibility with countless programming languages and approaches. The MySQL database project was purchased by Sun Microsystems for approximately $1 billion dollars in U.S. currency. The acquisition was among many other things, a shock to the online MySQL community as well as anyone else following today's tech news.

However, more importantly then the significance of this individual acquisition we must look at the overall pictures. Open-source development is a major player in software development and has been for a number of years. As far back as Apache, the world's most popular HTTP server which continues to serve over fifty percent of online websites, was founded in 1996 and is largely responsible for the spread of the World Wide Web. This powerful tool that helped really spark the dot com bubble and actively push the web into households everywhere was developed by a small team of open-source programmers that now has over 1,000 people on board the project. All of this was a result of a collaboration of open-source programmers who basically all came together for the same core group of reasons: peer review, peer recognition, and to spread valuable software for nothing more then reputation.

Open-source programming is nothing new to the online world; however, it has and will continue to become more and more of a force in the way that software is developed. In the beginning, we had Microsoft, IBM, Apple and a few other core companies that controlled the software market. Thanks to the spread of the World Wide Web, the globalization of our world's economy and the continued support by the online community to improve its growing creations we are entering a stage where a

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