[via Software Only]

Are you using MySQL? We are, and quite intensively, but not everywhere. Oracle (what an arrogant company…) is still in place in some of our e-business high-available productive environments. I am dreaming of the day when we will be able to get rid of the last Oracle database….
Anyway, Marc is writing about European Innovation. Marten Mickos from MySQL took part at this discussion. And Marc gives us some insights of MySQL.

MySQL is not the primary topic of his talk so he just states that it is the largest open source company, doubling revenues every year, growing 20 times over the past 4 years – to $20M run rate (not sure if this is their run rate, or their 2004 actuals). MySQL is used by the largest corporations in the world now, Internet “giants” and is THE standard database for most startups as part of the LAMP infrastructure. Just one data point: it is downloaded 40K times a day (1 every 2 sec). Marten refers to the company as the “RyanAir” of databases.

MySQL today is a company with 200 employees, 70% working from home, in 22 countries, and almost 100 locations. This created a lot of HR, legal and logistical headaches… but is also a great asset from a support standpoint. Employment contracts and stock options plans were a big issue because of the different tax and regulation systems MySQL had to deal with. Also they implemented a five weeks of vacation policy like in Sweden, no matter the country. Healthcare benefits are adapted to each country, with a policy of not being equal, but to be fair.

During the Q&A;, Marten pointed out that the database market was worth $15B, which means that MySQL still has a massive growth potential. The will maintain its sheer focus on being the reference database vendor for all types of applications, not competing with its clients/partners going “up stack” like Oracle did/does.
He also pointed out that Open Source is a software production model (and philosophy), not a business model. Each Open Source company needs to come up a clear value proposition that allows it to grow profitably without offending the community. Example is Apache: most successful Open Source piece of infrastructure in the world, and nobody is making a lot of money from it.