Oracle agrees to buy Sun
April 2009: Oracle’s Sun deal landed on the eve of the MySQL Users Conference — MySQL’s ownership path shifted again.
Oracle agreed to acquire Sun Microsystems (announced around 20 April 2009). For anyone living in the MySQL ecosystem that meant another ownership change a year after Sun bought MySQL — with knock-on questions for MySQL, Java, OpenSolaris/ZFS, OpenOffice, VirtualBox, and the rest of Sun’s portfolio.
The timing collided with the MySQL Users Conference keynote week. Opinions outran facts for months afterward; the durable engineering takeaway was simpler: plan for vendor and license uncertainty the same way you plan for hardware failure — with exit options, backups you have restored, and skills that transfer across forks (MariaDB, Percona, downstream builds).