Given Jonathan Schwartz’s proclamation that Sun will make further open source acquisitions, I’ve been putting some thought into likely targets and/or new directions opened up by the MySQL acquisitions. One likely target sector is the ecosystem of vendors that surround the MySQL database - such as clustering and HA software providers - as well as complementary technologies.

With that is mind it is interesting to see that the company has hired two key Python developers, Frank Wierzbicki and Ted Leung. As the Infoworld report states, this is similar to the way Sun previously approached support for JRuby and the success of that plan was an important factor for Leung.

“I’ve been very impressed with how Sun has handled the JRuby project,” he wrote. “Sun hired two of the leading JRuby contributors and gave them license to keep doing what they had been doing. The JRuby guys have been well received by the “C” Ruby community and even the CLR/.NET Ruby community.”

Meanwhile, Jython and that the Python Software Foundation will continue to be the steward for Jython’s code with Sun as a member.

Leung also maintained that from his view Sun’s commitment to dynamic languages - beyond JavaScript - is strong. “Sun is (finally?) very serious about this. As part of Sun’s new direction, Sun wants to give developers the ability to use whatever tool sets they want. Ruby, Python, PHP, Java. On or off OpenSolaris. On or off the JVM,” he wrote, while noting the Da Vinci Machine project to extend JVM’s support for languages other than Java.

When Sun acquired MySQL it was quick to boast about owning the M in LAMP - somewhat overlooking the fact that the L, A and P were not part of its portfolio. It is not unthinkable that Sun would now look to complete the jigsaw. By employing Python and Ruby developers Sun has shown that it is not adverse to supporting dynamic languages outside JavaScript. Adding PHP expertise would be another way.