HP was a potential suitor
This NY Times’ blog indicates Hewlett-Packard (HP) was a potential suitor to purchase Sun. However, with the purchase of EDS last year, HP was looking at a delay time table to pursuit Sun, which gave Oracle an opportunity to advance.
The rumor I heard for a while was that HP and Oracle were considering a joint purchase of Sun, with Oracle getting MySQL and HP basically taking the rest for itself… basically reinvigorating the HP line with Solaris and the T1/T2 Sparc chips.