I read about this on slashdot and commented about it in my blog.
Honestly, I don’t think it is a good move from Sun (especially considering the upcoming recession). They already have a descent database and most developers don’t care about which database they use. Some of our users do care; but only to require Oracle. I can think of better ways to spend 1 billion $ (ie. stock market buying opportunities are coming).
How would you spend $1B if you were Sun? I really have no idea what I would do…I vaguely remember reading that a lot of the core database developers (MySQL and Oracle) have worked for one then the other. They certainly could overlap new technologies and feature sets to make both better products - a sure bet in any economy. I think that teaming up against Microsoft makes sense in that space.