Sun Micro bought MySQL for $1 billion

I generally don’t cover industry news on my blog but this is surely an exception, Sun Micro buying MySQL for $1 billion. I was reading Jonathan Schwartz (Chief Executive Officer and President, Sun Microsystems, Inc.), when I stumbled upon Helping Dolphins Fly, where he said, “we’re putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you’re an industry insider, you’ll know what that means – we’re acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database.”


Sun bought mysql

This is good news! I just digged a little deeper into the happening at reuters.com, which says,

Forrester Research analyst Mike Gilpin said the acquisition was not so much about going head to head in the database market with Oracle Corp (ORCL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) or IBM (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research), but about strengthening its position in helping to run the Internet.

Btw, Oracle is the owner of the InnoDB database engine in MySQL (There are other storage engines, see falcon). I wonder how this might affect the global partnership between Sun and Oracle.

“This is Sun girding its loins for battle against Microsoft in terms of who’s going to run the Web,” he said.

Many of the top Internet sites like Facebook and youtube are running on Mysql.

I still wonder $1 billion?????? Isn’t it too much. Ebay paid a whooping $4.1 billion for skype and later regretted for it. I just hope that it doesn’t happen with Sun. Only 1% of mysql users pay for it. The only question that remains:

Will Sun tweak the license to milk its $1 billion?

Anyway a BIG News for the day!

2 Replies to “Sun Micro bought MySQL for $1 billion”

  1. I don`t see mysql competing with oracle sooner , Oracle is very competitive in enterprise market. Sun has a tendency of inheriting projects and then just fund it to go through development , I don`t see them doing something new in Enterprise market, This deal looks like to make Sun more future proof. 🙂

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