Another surprise development by Sun, paying out $1 billion to aquire MySQL, that’s reported to be $800K in cash and $200K in options. Rumor had it that Oracle has been trying to aquire MySQL a number of times in the past however they would not sell out to the database holding giant. Likely fearing that it would be squashed or strangled into non-existance or having licensing fees placed on the millions of open source community users.

Sun, having no other real database offering stands to be in a great position in the Open Source community. History shows Sun is willing to stand up for open source projects, MySQL developers should be allowed to continue development to improve the already stable database platform with new funding.

MySQL has a very proven track record with LAMP, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP as the leading webserver platform used all over the world. No other OS platform can match the performance and stability of LAMP proven time and again in native Linux enviroments. It has forever changed the landscape of the internet as a whole, for large web hosting companies and the general developer.

As reported by ComputerWorld and more details can be found here.

In a press release yesterday, ComputerWorld reports that Oracle is slated to buy BEA for $8.5 billion dollars. BEA best known for it’s Tuxedo middleware application server and their Weblogic webserver, both heavily used and licensed for another of Oracle’s recent purchases, the 800lb gorilla that everyone loves to hate, PeopleSoft, the Flagship of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications.

What does this mean for BEA’s products? At this point anyone who knows isn’t saying, however another press conference is scheduld for 1/17 where more details should be released.