Buying an open-source offering is the hot thing in Silicon Valley these days, and Sun Microsystems doesn't want to be left out. According to today's announcement, Sun will be picking up the open-source database company MySQL AB for a cool $1 billion.

The announcement, which came coupled with the news that Sun will exceed expectations on Wall Street, paves the way for MySQL to see wide adoption in large enterprise, an area traditionally held by proprietary offerings from Oracle. MySQL already sees wide use in web-based applications, and is part of the popular open-source software stack for websites known as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).

The deal, which involves $800 million of Sun's vast cash reserves — known to be almost $6 billion at the close of last year — and Sun's assumption of $200 million in options, is expected to close in the third or fourth quarter of the year.

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Justin Ryan is the News Editor for Linux Journal.
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