Sun has been the most ardent corporate supporters of Rails. They were even before JRuby.

Plus, Sun isn't really a big dog in the acquisition game.

It takes a pretty big dog to buy MySQL.

I should have said:

"Sun isn't really a big dog in the startup acquisition game."

MySQL wasn't a startup.

Sun makes plenty of acquisitions (mostly startups):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems#Acquisitions

In the past 5 years they've mostly been one of:

1) Hardware

2) Giant

3) Enterprisey

None of which are very applicable to the original question, which is about web software startups.

"None of which are very applicable to the original question, which is about web software startups."

You must have read a different question than I did. The original post mentions "startups", not "web software startups". Many News.YC readers are building things that Sun would find interesting, so I think Sun's acquisition history is relevant to our interests here at News.YC.

They've been doing a lot of non-hardware, non-enterprisey stuff in the past 5 years too. Primarily Solaris 10/OpenSolaris and DTrace among (many) other things.

DTrace continues to blow my mind.