Sun Microsystems announced today that they are buying Innotek. You can read the announcement here. In case you don't immediately recognize the name Innotek, they are the makers of the VirtualBox virtualization software that many of us have come to know and love. It's a great alternative to VMWare and they have an Open Source edition as well.

It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL. Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion – helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash. But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups.