Sun catching up with the 1980s
The most noteworthy thing about the Sun purchase of MySQL isn’t the purchase itself, but that it took Sun as long as it has. Sun has been around since the dawn of time in IT terms, is heavily into the enterprise market, you would have thought that a major presence in the relational database market would be acquisition #1.
Still, they’ve got there in the end. MySQL, as the predominant open source database, ties nicely into Sun’s re-branding as an open source oriented enterprise company.