[OSGeo-Discuss] relevance of Sun's acquisition of MySQL, and promoting support for open source

[jo at frot.org]

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/ - Sun says, 
"we're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP."

What are the implications of this for OSGeo and friends?
Maybe some of Sun's resources will go into bringing MySQL spatial
support up to scratch, at last, "spatially enable" a million web apps.

Perhaps more relevant is the emphasis Sun's rhetoric places on
*support arrangements* - taking quality of and demand for open source
software for granted. A "platform vendor" becomes more of a consulting
vendor offering "mission critical global support" for a whole stack of
stuff, platform through application. 

MySQL's dual-licensing stance is unusual, in some sense Sun have relly
bought the right not to have to relicense, who else will now take this
license model more seriously for their product, especially for data. 

The SPD
There's been a lot of setup work done on a directory of organisations
offering support for OSGeo software projects. Just another 20% would
make it actually useful. http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile 
is an interesting "advanced" interface but no-one's going to use it
as-is, none of the SPD gets indexed by search engines because it's all
query-based. A link-based browsable index to it would help catch
people who type in phrases like "geoserver support" to yahoo and google. 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/SPD_Prioritization has some
plans to highlight companies who employ committers, and of course 
Foundation sponsors, which would take this effort to the next level. 

But right now it's not at the first level. What is needed to move this
effort forward, to get it linked from the main OSGeo page, to
encourage contributions and make it easier to find? 
Who is focusing time on this right now?

cheers,


jo