We were so consumed with all things DEMO last week, that we almost overlooked Sun‘s announcement that it was expanding its “Startup Essentials” program to Canada, France, and Germany. The program gives developers substantial discounts on Sun hardware and software services in a bid for Sun to be the dominant platform for Web 2.0 applications and services.

Seeded in the U.S. in 2006 and expanded to China, India, Israel, and the U.K., the Startup Essentials program has had about 1,600 startups register to date, according to the company, with some 200 companies submitting new applications each month. Sun Startup Essentials is free to eligible companies, those in business fewer than four years and with less than 150 employees. In addition to deeply discounted hardware, participant companies have access to low-cost Web hosting services provided by Sun partners in the communities supported by the program, along with free technical support via e-mail. Sun also hosts occasional “Startup Camps” in key geographies; the next will be held in London in early March.

I talked with Sun’s director of Startups and Emerging Markets Sanjay Sharma about the program prior to the announcement, mostly curious about the country-by-country roll out of the program. After all, in the Web 2.0 world that Sun hopes to conquer, every application is potentially a global one. Why cherry-pick regions when a program like this can blanket the planet with electronic resources?

“For this program to be successful,” Sharma said, “we have to have feet on the street. ”

Sun identifies regions with significant startup activity and an engaged community. “We don’t want the first without the second,” he said.The company enlists Web hosting providers to service the program, and puts people on the ground in these communities.

The program is having an impact, according to Sharma, who claims that now two-thirds of Web 2.0 companies are using some combination of Solaris, mySQL (acquired by Sun in January), and other Sun infrastructure.

With the expansion of the Startup Essentials program, Sun is tasking its place among the platform providers wooing the global startup community. Microsoft’s Startup Accelerator program, launched last fall, is gaining momentum worldwide (Disclosure: Guidewire Group is a member of the Microsoft Startup Accelerator program) and Adobe has long supported startups with direct investment and services.

Each of these efforts is new enough that we foresee that all three will begin a full-court press to attract startups to their platforms. That can only be good for entrepreneurs who will have a range of choice in architecture at greatly reduced cost and with the further upside of go-to-market support.

We were pleased to read the news this morning that Sun Microsystems tendered a $1 billion offer to acquire open-source database provider MySQL. The deal has significance in a number of ways, not the least of which is the financial windfall to founder Marten Mickos and the company’s investors, Index, Benchmark, IVP, Intel and SAP, who put a reported total of $39million into the MySQL.

First, it’s further evidence that open source plus services business models can work, and that is no doubt as important to Sun as is the position MySQL gives Sun in the $15 billion enterprise database market. Sun demonstrated its commitment to free and open software when it turned the foundations of Solaris, Java, StarOffice, and other component technologies over to Open Source. But somehow, the acquisition of MySQL is a grander “money where your mouth is” gesture and solidifies Sun’s commitment to Open Source in the enterprise.

Here’s what CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote in his blog this morning:

The good news is Sun is already committed to the business model at the heart of MySQL’s success – first investing to grow communities of users and developers, and only then creating commercial services that attract (rather than lock in) paying customers. Over the past few years, we’ve distributed hundreds of millions of licenses and invested to build some of the free software world’s largest communities. . . . Free and open software has become a way of life at Sun.

. . . With this acquisition, we will have . . . positioned Sun at the center of the web, as the definitive provider of high performance platforms for the web economy. . . This creates enormous potential for Sun, for the global free software community, and for our partners and customers across the globe. (Read the entire post here.)

There’s a second and more subtle — but extremely important — impact of the MySQL acquisition and that is the impact the announcement may have on European technology startup communities. Throughout Europe, technology entrepreneurship remains an oddity, and success stories are relatively rare. We’ve worked within the European technology community for nearly a decade and can still count on our available digits the number of grand-slam exits for tech startups there, and the social and cultural risk of entrepreneurship remains high.

Perhaps, Mårten put it best during a keynote speech at Guidewire Group’s Innovate!Europe 2005 conference, as he accepted the award as Entrepreneur of the Year. Society’s values, he said, are reflected in the heroes it chooses. “We must celebrate entrepreneurs and turn them into heroes in order to build a society that values and honors technology and business innovation.”

Mårten and MySQL have become heroes.