Sun bought MySQL.
Also, Sun’s CEO {has a blog, doesn’t know how to resize images other than changing the HTML attributes}.
Remember back when they were a little below $5 a share and I said I thought they were going somewhere?
Next time I’m putting my money where my mouth is. They closed at $15.92 a share on Friday.
Of course, some are wondering whether this was a good buy. Not necessarily whether MySQL is good (it’s perhaps the most widely-used database in the world), but whether it makes sense to pay a billion dollars for it, when it’s (1) primarily an OpenSource product, and (2) going to take something like 20 years of revenues to break even. While I don’t quite buy the bit about it being a conspiracy with Oracle to kill the project, you should check out the page they link to, Sun’s list of acquisitions. It’s so bad that Sun appears to have a photograph of a dumpster with the Sun logo on it. (Okay, it’s a shipping crate. But it doesn’t make a ton of sense, and you have to grant that it looks a little bit like a dumpster.) It reminds me of when Sun bought Cobalt for $2 billion, and Cobalt went belly-up shortly thereafter. (I still think RaQs could be hot sellers today, by the way, if they were still being made. To take a company doing incredibly well and have it go belly-up in under a year takes some incredible mis-management.)
I’m not sure why Google, Yahoo or Microsoft would have been interested in buying MySQL. It makes a lot more sense for Sun to do so because they are trying to become meaningful in the open source field. Companies are greadually taking open source over (look at what IBM is doing for an example) and owning MySQL gives Sun a better entry into that field. I could see them trying MySQL into Java BTW. If Java and MySQL were to work together more seamlessly that would make life easier for a lot of developers and help Java hold on to market share.
While Sun has made a lot of bad moves in the past I don’t think people should assume they are idiots.
MySQL inside Java might be cool. (The converse: Java inside MySQL, would give me nightmares, though.)
I think Sun is going places, they just have a terrible track record when it comes to acquisitions, and paying $1 billion for an OpenSource application seems kind of strange.