…”I guarantee you it will be hard to sell an iPod five or seven years from now when every cell phone can access your entire music library wherever you are.”  — Sun CEO, Scott McNealy in a 2006 article at The Register.

Being big tech industry news, MacRumors posted a note on the Oracle buyout of Sun.  It points out that Sun attempted to buy Apple once, and there were two occasions where the companies nearly merged.  MR cites a 2006 article at The Register with Sun co-founder Bill Joy that I quoted above.

The article points out Scott McNealy’s hesitance toward Apple, especially the long range success of the iPod, which prompted the quote.   In retrospect, that quote looks so funny with my iPhone setting on my desk and talks that Apple is developing technology to stream music from your desktop to you Internet-connected iPhone or iPod anywhere in the world.  Three years later, Apple is going strong, and Sun has been gobbled up.

I you’ve read my blog, you’ll know that my primary concern with the acquisition of Sun from any company is the fate MySQL, which Sun purchased last year. Leading up to that purchase, Oracle had failed several times to buy MySQL itself, which I was happy about. MySQL offers database software in a market in which Oracle has yet to find a foothold, and I feared that Oracle acquiring the company might stifle the development of the open source product.

So here we are about a year later and Oracle ends up with MySQL via Sun. What will happen to MySQL now? Maybe it will be good for it or maybe bad, or maybe its open source roots will see its core survive under a different name like MariaDB or Drizzle.

My main question is “what will happen to MySQL?”, especially in the midst of confusion over what the real version of the popular DB software really is.  According to the Times article, though, MySQL could be a key reason that IBM is making this move.

I.B.M.’s acquisition of Sun would disrupt that long partnership with Oracle. I.B.M. could also undercut Oracle by more actively promoting the free MySQL software, which has become the most popular database software with Internet companies.  – NY Times article

My gut says Zend is next.

The Wall Street Journal, quoting “people familiar with the matter,” reported Wednesday that International Business Machines was in talks to buy Sun for at least $6.5 billion in cash, a premium of more than 100 percent over the company’s closing share price Tuesday. Officials of Sun and IBM could not immediately be reached for comment.

This is an interesting development considering Sun’s recent acquisition of MySQL AB, and IBM’s speculated interest in Zend, the primary developers of PHP.  Such a series of purchases would put IBM in a solid position to start using buzzwords like “cloud computing.”

Last.fm is all based around “scrobbling” the songs you play in iTunes, on your iPod, or however you listen to digital music. Scrobbling reports song plays to a Web server. Last.fm was born out of AudioScobbler, but where Last.fm takes off is in connection of it’s users based on play history. They’ve branched out recently to provide nice Flash-based playlists (see right column) and player. Anyway, their approach to social networking is especially cool.

Anyway, with CBS acquiring Last.fm, it will be interesting to see what direction they go. Congrats to the Last.fm team.