Dvorak thinks that Sun is in cahoots with Oracle as far as the MySQL purchase goes:

I'm close to being convinced that Oracle wanted to buy MySQL to kill the product, but knew that it couldn't pull off the stunt itself. It would be too obvious, especially to European Union regulators. So it sent in a stooge to do the job.

The two companies, Sun and Oracle, have been strategic partners for years. On top of that, Sun cannot actually afford to spend a $1 billion on a company producing a mere $60 million in revenue and working outside its core competencies.

The purchase price does make me blink in astonishment. Sun's CEO is gushing about this deal, but heck - when was the last time Schwartz wasn't excited about an opportunity to give away software and not make any money? I get the theory - Sun gets behind MySQL to boost the LAMP stack, and in the process sells more hardware.

Except... If I wanted to run the LAMP stack, why would I buy expensive Sun hardware to do it? Why wouldn't I buy commodity intel boxes, or - even simpler - rent EC2 from Amazon? As to offering support for MySQL, I'm sure there's a business there. I'm also sure that's not worth a billion dollars. This deal might have made sense for a lot less money, but - at a billion - Sun got taken to the cleaners, blinded by Schwartz' love of open source.

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