Sun Acquiring Innotek (Virtualbox)

From Tectonic, I read that Sun Microsystems is in the process of acquiring Innotek, makers of Virtualbox. Virtualbox is a relatively new free virtualisation suite that compares well to many of the proprietary virtualisation suites. This comes just a month after they bought MySQL for a cool US$1bn. Virtualbox is also packaged for Ubuntu, you can get it by installing the virtualbox-ose package.

Is it just me? Or are companies now acquiring other companies at a much larger rate than usual? It seems that the landscape of the free software and the proprietary software industries are getting quite shaked up by these acquisitions. Motorola may be selling their cellphone division soon, and Google is working hard on the Android platform, I’ve been speculating internally whether Google would buy them out (or even whether they’ll have enough money to do so). Google’s focus is on the software side, but I think it would give them a healthy boost to acquire a big market share out of the box. Then again, that’s a bit off-topic for this post, I think 2008 will prove to be an interesting year for the information industry with all these acquisitions that have taken place, and those still looming.