With Sun Microsystems' $1 billion acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL announced Wednesday, Sun gets ownership of a major player in the open source software industry while MySQL gets the backing of a multibillion-dollar, established systems company.
Sun Microsystems will pay $1 billion for Swedish software company MySQL, whose open source database is used for some of the most widely visited Web sites in the world.
Sun said the deal will augment its position in the enterprise IT market, including the $15 billion database market.
Sun said MySQL's product line will help it give further support to the open source Web application platform known as LAMP, the acronym for the Linux OS, Apache Web server, MySQL database, and the PHP/Perl programming languages.
Databases are crucial for Internet-based applications in sites offering a range of services, from e-commerce to social networking. Sun will pay $800 million in cash and $200 million in options, and the deal is expected to close by the end of Sun's 2008 fiscal year, which will end June 30.
MySQL has become a formidable competitor to other relational database management systems from companies such as Oracle and IBM. The database itself is free for people to download, and MySQL makes money by offering subscription support packages.
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technorati tags: sun, mysql, open source
Sun Micro Buys Open-Source Firm MySQL for $1B
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