Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

OK, I admit to serious misuse of Obama-mania in my blog title. But think about it, Obama's biggest problem is clearly going to be addressing the economy, and what better way than encouraging the government and commercial companies alike to save money with open source software. Yes, as one of the biggest developers of open source software, this is very self-serving to Sun. But as most of the world has learned, the benefits of open source software go way beyond the economic benefits.

When software is open source, communities tend to develop around the product and those community members, including people working at lots of big companies, contribute to the software's success. Take the Sun xVM Server virtualization platform, who is working on it besides Sun? Try this search on Intel's web site and you will see that quite a few people at Intel are. I guess Intel wants to make sure Sun xVM Server is ready to support the latest Intel VT virtualization features as they are introduced in new Intel chipsets. Even if you aren't working for a company that builds their own CPUs, you can join the OpenxVM community and participate too. Not interested in coding but just want to try out xVM Server? You can download xVM Server Early Access 2 and try it out for yourself. We will even give you a free copy of OpenSolaris to run as a guest.

Sorry, for the free early access program, you have to provide your own copy of Windows if you want to run it as a guest. While we are working very closely with Microsoft to support Windows on Sun xVM, you still need to pay Microsoft to run their OS as a guest. But what you will get for that is full interoperability, no more, "sorry, Microsoft doesn't support [insert your favorite virtualization platform], you will have to replicate your bug on a standalone copy of Windows and call back" from the Microsoft support line. The xVM Blog is a great source of ongoing information for xVM.

Of course, Sun brings you a lot more open source software than just OpenSolaris and Sun xVM. One of our most popular open source products is MySQL. MySQL is the leading open source database and today Sun made it even easier to run MySQL by introducing five new MySQL solutions, with MySQL running on Solaris, Linux, or Windows, on Sun servers and storage, optimized for x86 performance, virtualization, rich media storage, multi-tier deployment, and backup. Each solution is matched to either a SPARC, Intel, or AMD based Sun server optimized for the solution. No more guesswork of trying to pick the right processor for your application or blogging about how much you hate your storage vendor.

And now in closing, back to the title, it does appear that MySQL contributed significantly to Obama's victory and to BarackObama.com