2008 just started strong with probably one of the most important acquisitions of the year, taking us all by surprise. According to Swedish media, the acquisition fee was $800 million in cash and $200 million in options.

Considering that MySQL powers some of the largest sites, this might be a nice strategic move to get a foot into the RDBMS game and wag it back to the likes of Oracle and M$. However, I hope they keep it alive and healthy for the open source community. For I cannot imagine LAMP without the strong “M” in it.

Who is Sun Microsystems?

• Founded 1982 by Andreas von Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy
• 34.200 employees worldwide, 13.9 billion dollars (9.4 billion euros) in revenues FY 2007, market cap (total value of all Sun shares) about the same as yearly revenues
• Grew astronomically with the Web, suffered from the Web bubble, now profitable over the last four quarters
• Lead by Scott McNealy until 2006, now by Jonathan Schwartz (a prolific blogger)
• The world’s biggest contributor to Open Source: Open Office, Java (now under GPL), GlassFish, NetBeans — and soon MySQL
• Environmentally friendly; large numbers of distributed employees working at least partially from home
• Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, just south of Cupertino (MySQL’s North American headquarters)
• Counts some of the worlds most brilliant innovators amongst its current and past employees