Rod Johnson of Spring fame has posted The Power of Adoption: Why No Company is Big Enough to Deny Developers What They Want to talk about two big software company acquisitions that were announced today. Oracle announced it is buying BEA. And Sun announced it bought MySQL.

For BEA, I was hoping they would succeed at combining the power of JRockit with AquaLogic to build scalable workflow (ala BPM) services. Instead, we users and developers will be waiting for years to see WebLogic and AquaLogic integrated into the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack.

For MySQL, I was hoping for an IPO. My company, PushToTest, is an open-source software publisher and I was looking to MySQL to show me the way to go really big. $1 Billion just does not sound like that much considering Oracle is currently worth $113 Billion. Actually a lot of us in the OSS space were looking for the MySQL IPO as a proof-point that OSS investments are a good thing generally.

To the good people at BEA and MySQL I send a heart felt congratulations. As a user and developer I wonder what the future holds?

-Frank Cohen