One of the biggest items of tech news recently has been Sun’s purchase of the company behind the open source database software MySQL, for a billion dollars. As one joker on a forum said: What?! They didn’t know that they could just download it for free??

But seriously, this is an interesting development. MySQL is very popular and is used as part of the back-end by many websites (including this one). However it is open source and it is available for a free download. So why would Sun want to pay a billion dollars for it? The answer seems to be that there’s still reasonable money to be made out of customer support. Databases can be complex things and users, especially businesses, can be willing to pay for that. It’s not a new business model for the open source world - Red Hat has basically been doing the same thing with its version of Linux. What is interesting is that Sun thinks that this business model is going to be sufficiently profitable to make it worth a billion dollars, i.e., that it will be able to generate 100 - 200 million in profits per year. Sun’s CEO explains more about the purchase in a blog post here.