SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Sun Microsystems Inc (JAVA.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Wednesday it would buy Swedish open-source developer MySQL AB for about $1 billion to expand into the $15 billion database market, and that preliminary quarterly results showed no impact from the slowing U.S. economy.

“But the biggest news of the day is… 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.” (source)

“Given Sun’s proven track record as the largest contributor to Open Source, I think MySQL users have plenty of reason to feel happy about the acquisition. There are many companies that attempt to ride the wave of positive attention towards Open Source, but in my judgement, Sun gets it right. Sun gets Open Source. Java has been released under the GPL. There’s the OpenSolaris operating system. There’s Open Office / Star Office. There’s the GlassFish application server. There’s the NetBeans IDE tool. And more.” (source)

Involved Companies:
http://www.mysql.com/
http://www.sun.com/