Sun Microsystems buys MySQL for 1 billion USD

" We announced big news today - our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we're acquiring MySQL AB." - Jonathan Schwartz - CEO of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Read more here. Sun & MySQL AB press conference here.

I'm also not quite sure on how will this impact Sun's long term policy on PostgreSQL. Sun offers PostgreSQL support (PostgresSQL on Solaris even has native DTrace probes), and was a big contributor to the project. I don't think they would drop PostgreSQL support though. Maybe port PostgreSQL to MySQL as a storage engine? :-).

I'd still like to know how Sun expects to make money off MySQL. Well, enough money to justify the 1 billion investment. Sun does tend to make money off support contracts, services, hardware and all that, but MySQL AB hardly managed to pull in $50 million last year. And they have around 350 employees. And besides, nothing stopped Sun from selling MySQL support and all that before.

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:JAVA

Sun Microsystems also released the Preliminary Results for Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2008 Report:

"Sun expects to report revenues for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 of approximately $3.60 billion, an increase of approximately 1 percent as compared with $3.57 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2007. Net bookings for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 were approximately $3.85 billion, an increase of approximately 7% year over year."

I'm waiting to see how Oracle (who already bought Open Source databases Berkeley DB2 and the MySQL InnoDB engine) will react to this one. Remember what Oracle did when RedHat bought JBoss? Shortly after, Oracle "Unbreakable" Enterprise Linux (based on RHEL sources) "just happened". What now? OracleSolaris? :-). Oracle also tried to buy MySQL AB before.

On a side note, Oracle bought BEA today, for $8.5 billion, after BEA turned down their original offer of $6.7 billion. Here's the Oracle Press Release. A nice addition to their "strategic acquisition" list, which already gathered almost 40 entries since 2005.