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Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NDAQ: JAVA) shares continued their rally this week despite concerns about the future of its flagship database product MySQL. The technology giant was hit with a wave of criticism from open source advocates after officials disclosed plans to reserve some of its key upcoming features for paying customers.

Sun Microsystem's MySQL is one of the most popular database applications on the web that gained most of its popularity through its $0 price tag and open source code base. Sun acquired MySQL in February for $1 billion and recently announced that many of the new so-called "high-end add-ons" would be made available only to enterprise customers.

Changes like these have led to a rift between the open source community, which was behind the original development of MySQL, and Sun Microsystems who currently owns the rights to the software. Technology companies have traditionally made money off of such open source acquisitions by charging fees for technical support, but Sun has been trying to sell enterprise licenses with special features to generate additional revenues.

The first signs of trouble began last August when Sun Microsystems decided to stop making MySQL Enterprise code available to users without paid subscriptions. Last week's news marks the second uprising between the two parties and many fear that it may alienate its thousands of free users in exchange for only a few paid enterprise customers.

Today, Sun Microsystems appears to be backing off such claims. Senior officials promised users in several blog posts that the core online backup capabilities being developed for the latest version of MySQL will be made available to the public under the GNU General Public License, despite the final decisions on the distribution of the other add-ons.

The open source community may be satisfied for the time being with this large feature being included for free, but the compromise marks more troubles for Sun Microsystems who must again look for ways to monetize its open source offerings.

Sun Microsystems shares rose $0.22, or 1.42%, on the day.

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