Purchase of MySQL by Sun Microsystems for $1B for a company that makes $80M a year? This raised lots of questions. Let ‘s use smaller numbers cause it ‘s not easy to think billions. Say you want to purchase a pizza store that makes $80K a year.

Would you pay 12.5 yearly incomes for this pizza store? I would not. But Sun did and explained this purchase . But are there other reasons?

MySQL Server is an excellent DBMS. MySQL is a lot better than SQLLite.

Maybe Sun purchased it to make sure that their competitors won ‘t be able to buy it? The fight for the rich desktop client is just heating up. Both Google Gears and Adobe AIR use SQLLite database on the client. What if they ‘d purchased MySQL before Sun did? It ‘d make competitors stronger. Now it won ‘t. Google ‘s Gear is not dangerous, but AIR is a direct competitor to Java on the client. If this is the actual reason behind this purchase, Sun Microsystems did a very smart move. Eventually, when JavaFX will start competing on the client, having such a great client DB as MySQL will become quite handy.

Does this thought sounds stupid to you? If yes, I got another one. Information Week sites Jonathan Schwartz saying “I think what you ‘ll see from Sun is that we ‘re just going to take the ‘J ‘ off the ‘JVM ‘ and just make it a ‘VM ‘ “. That ‘s perfectly fine – JVM shines and it makes sense to use it as a runtime for multiple languages, not just Java.

My other stupid question is “What ‘s going to be the next ticker of Sun Microsystems? ”

SUNW turned into JAVA last year. What ‘s the next one?