Re: Sun buys MySQL

simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com (Simon Riggs) writes:
> On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 12:35 -0500, Chris Browne wrote:
>> And an important reason behind paying $1B
>
> Insightful stuff. $1B is too round a number to be a real valuation,
> IMHO. I'm not really certain they would do that.

They didn't; as is pretty standard, in such matters, the total
"valuation" was comprised of a combination of cash and Sun stock
options. Mind you, there is $800M of cash involved, and *only* $200M
worth of stock options.

I expect that the ratios frequently go the other way...

> Certainly Sun would be foolish to pay $1B for MySQL when Oracle and
> IBM had already paid so much less for profitable and strategic
> pieces of the MySQL cake.

I'll give you strategic, but I'm not so sure about profitability. In
a way, we may now find out more, because rather than being a private
firm, MySQL now is rolled into a publicly traded one...
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