Sun Buys MySQL

The big news today is that Sun purchased MySQL: Sun Press Kit, Sun Announcement, MySQL Announcement and Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog Announcement.

Let’s get the obvious issues/questions out of the way first. The purchase price is $1 billion, $800 million cash, $200 million in options. What is this going to mean for Sun’s PostgreSQL development? How will this impact the relationship between Sun and Oracle? Historically Sun has been one of the big iron Oracle platforms. Oracle owns a vital piece of MySQL, InnoDB. And of course, what will this mean to the MySQL community?

Now some of my own thoughts on this deal. This seems like something of a desperate move for both companies. In the case of MySQL, they need to find a way to stay intact as a company and bring in lots of cash. Guess all that talk of an IPO goes out the window now. So the list of potential buyers becomes pretty small. It would have to be to a company with lots of hard core tech but without a major database platform of their own, which rules out Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Google and Yahoo might have smart folks who could make it better, but getting into the customer support business isn’t something that they’d want to do. So how many other big tech companies are left that would be willing or able to pay the kind of money that MySQL was looking for? Like I said, small list.

Then there is the Sun side of this deal. Recently Sun has been pushing PostgreSQL, but there isn’t one single company behind PostgreSQL, making it much more difficult to control in the manner that Sun prefers. In this respect MySQL fits perfectly, although it is Open Source (mostly), there really isn’t much of a developer community for it. Basically all development happens at MySQL the company. This would allow Sun to have the same massive grip over development that it has had for its other open source products. I think another factor is that Sun desperately wants to avoid becoming ignored in the world of big name web companies. They’ve developed some great stuff (Dtrace, ZFS) and even open sourced their OS (Solaris), but have still have failed to get their foot in the door in any big way for tech startups. So if you can’t convince them to like you, buy someone they already do. And better to do it now while you still have the money to do so.

Sun has just bought their way into becoming every tech company’s best friend. Maybe now they’ll change their stock ticker symbol from JAVA to MYSQL.