I'm not a business person, but couldn't Sun, for example, get almost everything it got out of buying MySQL by partnering with them, paying much less than $1b (p

I'm not a business person, but couldn't Sun, for example, get almost everything it got out of buying MySQL by partnering with them, paying much less than $1b (perhaps paying nothing)? I mean, doesn't buying MySQL practically guarantee it will lose the very value it could bring to Sun (more agile process, highly motivated small company, close contact with the OSS dev & user community)? One of the themes in "Burn Rate" is how, once corporations became aware of the Internet, they began purchasing anything they perceived "belongs" to the Internet and was for sale, hoping to somehow own some part of it. Perhaps, at some degree, a similar thing is happening with Open Source now? (Edit: please don't get me wrong, I truly believe Open Source is one of the most important ideas of our time. I'm just skeptic a company can buy its way into it)