I was at the MySQL conference when it was announced that Oracle was buying Sun. It just took all the life out of the conference. All the Sun folks were super pissed off. Truly the end of an era.
I was there too. It certainly felt "timed" to maximize the sense of deflation for people working on MySQL. Perhaps it was just coincidence. IIRC Larry Ellison said that the crown jewel in the deal was actually Java.
I remember that time. It felt like Sun was on death's doorstep since the dot-com crash. On the hardware side, the market was flooded with used Sun hardware. On the software side, Linux was "good enough" for most workloads.
