OStatic

Yesterday Computerworld reported that MySQL cofounder and lead engineer David Axmark has resigned from Sun Microsystems. Axmark indicated that he felt he would be better off in smaller organizations and working with MySQL and Sun on a less formal basis.

Axmark's involvement with MySQL has included heading the engineering, internal IT, and community relations efforts of the project. Since January, when Sun purchased MySQL, Axmark has been working mostly with the press and in community relations.

OpenOffice.org is in an unenviable place. Office suites -- word processors, spreadsheets, presentations and the ilk -- are utilitarian, complex bundles of software. They are a necessity of modern life, used daily by individuals and businesses all over the world.

It isn't that people take them for granted. People don't consider them much at all. It has been a long time since I've had any feelings whatsoever about an office suite. There have been developments in office software that have been innovative, such as online document creation. And though useful, I still can't honestly say that I've been enthusiastic about (or, since Clippy, repulsed by) any office application.

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Andy Patrizio, over at InternetNews.com, is trotting out that tired old question once again: where are the open source billionaires? as if that was somehow relevant or necessary for open source to be worthwhile. Patrizio also suggests that open source is being carried by large vendors, but doesn't seem to grasp the benefits that the vendors are getting out of open source.

OpenOffice.org, the open source office suite originally derived from Sun's corresponding StarOffice product, is out with the first public beta of version 3.0.

While the new features are not revolutionary, this is a solid release that's plenty good enough for many users to adapt as their primary office suite. There is definitely good news for Mac users.

Despite the occasional brush with critics in the open source community, Sun continues to maintain that it will ship all of its software assets as open source (though in some cases the timeframes are not clear).

One of the prominent areas where the company is following through on this at the moment is with its storage offerings.

A recent interview with Sun's Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green (published yesterday in eWeek) makes for fascinating reading, especially in conjunction with the dustup over Sun's announcement that some MySQL enhancements will not be open-sourced.

Understanding how Sun views open source goes a long way toward explaining what's going on, and telegraphing its future strategy.