Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world’s fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration. The acquisition accelerates Sun’s position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today’s announcement reaffirms Sun’s position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

Well, One Billion Dollars is a lot of money, but this is an incredible buy consider how the market evaluates this college social network at 15 billion dollars. As Sun claimed to be the dot in the first dot com bubble, MySQL probably powers most of the Web 2.0 start ups in the current Web 2.0 bubble. Not to mention MySQL is available on almost all the web hosting packages, powering many ready-to-install open source applications. Sun has also been transforming itself into an open source company. We have OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and Java — and now MySQL! They just need to somehow acquire Apache (or lighty?) to have the entire web application stack under its umbrella.

From Jonathan Schwartz’s blog, it is great to hear that Jim Starkey’s Falcon is still on track, as it is probably the next stage weaponary against Oracle, who acquired InnoDB earlier on. Interesting time ahead.

(By the way, the photo of Mårten Mickos and Jon Schwartz came from this MySQL blog entry.)

Found this comment on Slashdot:

Why did they buy it?

Didn’t they know they could just download it and run without paying?

Sure, it is intended to be a funny comment, but from commentaries from TechCrunch on this very event, open source software as business model seems to be a foreign concept to many. Even funnier fact is, most TechCrunch readers actually regard free web services as viable business model.

Hmm.