We work with Sun on a lot of web projects and I've heard a bunch of people ask "Why did Sun Microsystems pay $1 billion for a MySQL, a company that gives its product away for free?" This weekend Sun's President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz made a relatively candid blog post outlining Sun's motivations and the effects that the purchase will have on Sun's existing relationships with Oracle and PostgreSQL. Basically, Sun is focused on building and supporting data centers, data centers that run Solaris and Oracle on Sun hardware, data centers that run Linux and MySQL on HP hardware, or (as is increasingly the case) some mixture of numerous technologies. MySQL is positioned as the database of choice for the web. Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Second Life all use MySQL as a core component of their technical infrastructures. As these companies grow larger and tomorrow's web companies grow to maturity they will need help building and supporting data centers. Sun hopes to provide not only paid MySQL support contracts but also sell hardware and support an array of software products. It will be interesting to watch things unfold.

Here's a video from the Sunday before last with top Sun and MySQL folks talking about the deal.

via Mashable