Every so often when you hear about a large corporate purchase, you get to sit around, scratch your head, and wonder how in the world it came to be. Fortunately, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, decided to remove that veil of mystery around the recent acquisition of MySQL.
In a blog post this weekend, Mr. Schwartz gives readers a full history of how the purchase came about. There's a lot more information presented than one would expect. Schwartz provides answers to some frequently asked questions as to why Sun wanted the company, how the two companies will merge, and what will happen with their own SQL product, PostgreSQL, among other things.
It is an engaging read from an industry that is usually so tight lipped about the hows and the whys of large corporate takeovers.
Short excerpt:
"What happens to your commitment to PostgreSQL?
It grows. The day before we announced the acquisition, and within an hour of signing the deal, I put a call into Josh Berkus, who leads our work with Postgres inside of Sun. I wanted to be as clear as I could: this transaction increases our investment in open source, and in open source databases. And increases our commitment to Postgres - and the database industry broadly. The same goes for our work with Apache Derby, and our JavaDB."