January 16, 2008 3:45 PM PST
Sun + MySQL in just five weeks
Dave Rosenberg, Ashlee Vance, and I are doing an emergency Open Season podcast with Marten Mickos, CEO of MysQL, and Rich Green EVP of Software at Sun Microsystems, and they've said some things that blew me away. You'll get to hear them all when we publish the podcast later, but I can't resist on one particular fact.
Guess how long the entire process, beginning to end, took? Five weeks. From the first phone call to today's announcement, the deal took five weeks.
You can't get a partnership going with Sun (or anyone) in that time period. But $1 billion changed hands in just five weeks. That's pretty impressive. It's also a testament to how committed the two sides were to each other at a business and personal level.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is chief operating officer at Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Prior to Canonical, Matt was general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, an open-source applications company. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
