Where's The Beef?

I'm no financial genius. Proof hangs on my office wall in the form of a framed Bre-X Minerals share certificate...

Maybe not being a genius is the reason I don't understand how Sun can possibly justify paying 1 billion dollars for MySQL AB, including $800 million in cash.

That's $2,000,000 cash per MySQL employee.

For a while after hearing about the purchase, I was really confused because I thought Oracle had already bought MySQL.

But no, what Oracle bought was the company called Innobase OY. They're the folks who make InnoDB, the actual transactional database brains behind MySQL:

InnoDB is the most popular transactional storage engine for MySQL. Unlike MyISAM, InnoDB is not only ACID compliant, but it also supports row-level locking and referential integrity.

So Sun is paying $1B for a non-transactional, non-relational file system that anyone can download for free? Couldn't Sun just put a link to download MySQL on their website and save the money?

Can anyone explain that to me?

Anyone?