At our Heidelberg dev-meeting a few months ago, Mårten announced that the entire company would meet in mid-January in my town, Orlando, Florida. I was blinded by the thought of coming to the City of Cement and Glitter, after meetings in beautiful places all over the world, like Budapest, Malta, Sorrento, Stockholm, Cancún, Seattle, Helsinki, Budapest, New York — and then coming to where I live. Ugh. How embarassed would I be?

Well once I recovered and gave it thought, I was certain that there would be an announcement of IPO at the meeting. MySQL has been preparing for publicly offering stock for a while. It made so much sense.

Today, the third day of the meeting (for me), I was late to the start. I walked in and it took me 15 full minutes to realize that right then was The Big Event, and it was not what I was expecting.

Instead, Sun Microsystems (ticker JAVA, née SUNW) decided to pay one billion dollars for MySQL. I am shocked and dizzy.

It might not be a complete disaster. Sun has behaved lately like it understands Free software: See GPL Java and OpenSolaris . They seem to understand working at home. They seem to like what MySQL employees are doing. I am cautiously optimistic.

So, I’ll have a “sun.com” email address soon. I don’t know if I’ll have to give up chad at mysql dot com. I hope not. I’ll get new business cards. I’ll get access to lots of good hardware.

Maybe it’s not awful. We’ll see.

16 Jan 2008, 22:37 #