As we all know, a lot of internet traffic was generated by this news over the last couple of days. In a local mailing list, I read this comment:
WOW!!! US$ 1Bn for that.
This could be any eye-opener for the people who say there is no money in FOSS 
Below is my response to this comment (which I have posted on that mailing list too – but my blog is a good place for me to talk instead of having to listen to abstract philosophy in every other sentence):
I’ll interpret that as, “For people who think money cannot be made from owning source code to a FOSS project”, which nobody has ever debated . (I can feel the flames coming.)
The billion-dollar question (it’s very rare occasions when one can use such a phrase figuratively and literally one one shot) was, “Can I make money by _using_ GPL’d code” and the question just got answered!
MySQL was GPL’d already – and Sun could have just bought a copy (or licence or support or whatever MySQL sells) to get their source code (assuming Sun was already stupid enough not to download a tarball (further assuming I’m not stupid to have assumed a tarball is available for public download)).
The real key here is ownership of the copyrights to the MySQL codebase. That’s what sun paid 1Bn for. In that case, the money went to buying out a copyright. 
Can’t really understand the merits of the code being GPL’d or otherwise – people pay money for copyrighted code every day of the week.
Nobody had ever debated the prospects of making money so long as _you’re_ the owner of the codebase. In fact this is an eye-opener for those who were being told, “Hey, you can make money from MySQL because it’s GPL’d.” Now if a company with Sun’s magnitude and power and influence and fan-following can’t make money from the GPL’d version, it’s hard to believe that an individual might make money from it. 
Of course, I’m not at all saying MySQL isn’t “free as in free speech” (lest I should be mailed a whole lot of philosophy), but since “money” is considered orthogonal to freedom, I’m simply talking on that aspect.
Since we’re on that topic, there was an interesting post on a zdnet blog recently about “definition of freedom” and a comparison between the BSD-style licence which allows you to make proprietary forks of their code and the GPL. Ultimtely it’s upto the benelovence of the “owner of the code” (I have to agree with Torvalds here), to maintain “freedom”.
1. In the GPL licence, you have the freedom to do anything with the software except sell it’s source code separately (as a separate entity from the binaries). This means that whoever owns the copyrights to the code (Trolltech, MySQL, etc.) could just fork a proprietary version without you being able to do anything about it (do not misinterpret that; I admit _most_ of those who ask for transfer of copyright are in fact benevolent; all I’m saying is that this is not a licence-imposed necessity). The average guy still competes with other players who have the GPL’d code.
2. Under the BSD-style licence, if one guy makes a proprietary fork, then so can you. You can go head-to-head and try and kill each other off. If Berkeley makes a proprietary fork, every single person on earth can do the same and neutralize the playing field. (To answer all those who were wondering why after having funded PostgreSQL so much, Sun bought out MySQL). If they’d bought (without need) the PostgreSQL codebase, every programmer on earth worth his two cents would have made a proprietary fork to compete against Sun. With MySQL…. well you get the picture.
Please do not misinterpret this post. I’m sure Sun will ensure everyone gets all the code and we already know Google is planning to give back a lot of their in-house modifications to the public code-base. All I’m saying is, the 1Bn of money that was paid, was paid for the conventional thing you pay any proprietary company for – the ownership of copyrighted code.
