A Linux Year in Review: Sun's Very Big Buy

Rounding up the top stories in the open source world starts with one very big deal.

Some might argue it was a middling year of news about open source and the Linux operating system. Whatever the sentiment, 2008 proved another year of solid growth and new releases for open source and Linux vendors.

In our week-plus look at the top stories, trends and themes of 2008, we pause to look at how some of them played out with vendors and end-users.

Sun Buys MySQL

Sun's $1 billion acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL was one of the biggest open source stories of the year. The deal, announced in January, closed just over a month later on February 26th.

The deal put MySQL at the forefront of Sun's database plans, shaking up its relationship with the open source PostgreSQL database and losing their PostgreSQL lead.

The acquisition also inspired some closed source hysteria when Sun pre-announced the release of MySQL 5.1 in April. As it turns out, MySQL 5.1 was substantially delayed and did not get released until December.

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