Sun is the giant billion-dollar company that created the popular programming language Java. Sun closed a deal with the Swedish company MySQL, the company that makes the wildly popular, opensource MySQL database software. You may be thinking, “How does a business survive on giving away free products”. The answer is simple: MySQL sells support for most of their profit. For the non-webbies out there. MySQL is a very, very, very popular database software similar to Oracle or IBM but in a web sense. Everything uses it if you run a Linux server. WordPress uses it, PHPBB uses it, Vanilla uses it. Everything uses it. It is part of LAMP: Linux OS, Apace Web Server, MySQL database and PHP/Perl server side scripting. All parts of LAMP are opensource and free, and in many ways are superior to their proprietary brethren: MIMA: Microsoft OS, IIS Web Server, MS SQL (creative huh?), and ASP/ASP.net. I get the hosting for this blog and forum from 1&1. When I was a nooblet (hehe funny word) at web design, I though that Microsoft would be better because I liked the desktop operating system, so why wouldn’t I like their web server. I was dead wrong. No MySQL and no PHP drove me insane. I tried ASP and hated it. I went back to LAMP and now I know quite a bit about PHP. I am happy.

Anyways, back to the story. With that background knowledge out of the way, Sun is buying MySQL for $1B. The MySQL CEO is going over to be on the board of directors and everyone is happy. Sun is known for supporting opensource because of its support for the OpenOffice project.