Sun Microsystems, Inc. is the server hardware company that brought us the Java programming language almost by accident and then changed their stock ticker symbol to JAVA even though it is not their core business and they have never directly made any money from it.
Recently they purchased MySQL - a company founded on database software that everyone can download and use for free. Arguably they did so in order to hedge their bets against Oracle, Inc. - the database company that is buying up any small software company that gets fashionable with the Fortune 200 crowd for more than a week. So maybe it was a Good IdeaTM. But they also recently bought NetBeans for a lot of money - which is a program that you use to write Java programs - that you can also download and use for free.
So Sun is really into free software right now. They are also losing a lot of money right now.
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