Last week amongst the fun at the MySQL Users Conference I woke up early enough one day to watch the keynote at which Jonathan Schwartz presented a 30 minute talk about the aquisition, Open Source software in general, and Sun’s principles. I highly recommend watching this keynotes replay and I kindly ask that you resist the urge to flip through it, but rather get a cup of coffee (I need Illy as a sponsor) and set aside 30 minutes to watch it end-to-end.

If you can not see this embedded video above, click here: Jonathan Schwartz Keynote at MySQL

There are some very important things in this presentation…

Most strikingly is a comment regarding ZFS at the 15:00 mark, “its under a CDDL license but rumor has it there might be a change in its future.” It would be hard to imagine ZFS getting re-licensed and not DTrace… and there has been GPL talk around Nevada in the past. We know OpenSolaris is coming in May. Draw your own conclusions.

The vibe in general here is that Sun is committed to Open Source software, more than ever before, and has big plans in the future. In many ways there are amusing parallel between the Open Systems or Open Standards talks that Scott McNealy used to do and Jonathan’s Open Source talks.

…. after much debate, I’m not going to editorialize this anymore, but I recommend watching it to any Sun supporters specifically as they relate to the free software developers external to Sun.