[General] Sun to buy MySQL for $1 billion

[Majed B.]

Thanks to Mr. Burhan, I realized that facebook is running on Apache as
well. (checked with curl -D header.txt facebook.com) .. I thought it
was a Microsoft house, but MS did buy a share of Facebook (5%).
[http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+facebook+site%3Aslashdot.org&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8]

Recently, facebook acquired Plaxo, which is responsible for OpenID.
So, now some major Open-Source software is coming to the hands of
known entities, and hopefully, will become mainstream and stay open,
as it was before acquisitions.

Mr. Burhan,
  I'm not quite sure that Oracle didn't get a good deal out of BEA.
Middleware is not a small area, and a lot of organizations &
governments run on middleware, like BEA & WebSphere.
In fact, the ministry of interior has a deal with IBM to implement its
portals using WebSphere, which provides portlets, mashups, document
management systems, content management systems, and a lot more,
(without mentioning AJAX support for all these).
Check out the areas WebSphere tackles:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/websphere/

I believe this acquisition of BEA puts a threat on IBM, since now
Oracle can fight it in the DB & Middleware areas, but judging by
Oracle's lame approaches & very-high prices, there's a possibility
that they'd fail.
It would be nice to see more competitors, so that consumers get the
benefit of reduced prices, but some competitors don't know their heads
from their knees...
-- 
       Majed B.