Mickos: a New Year of 'radical transparency' for MySQL

Marten Mickos, SVP of Sun's database group, could be forgiven for resting on his billion-dollar laurels, having sold MySQL to Sun in early 2008 for $1 billion (despite an S1 to go public in the works). But on New Year's Eve, Mickos sent out a missive to "customers, partners, users, colleagues, [and] friends," declaring MySQL's "radical transparency" a commencement and coda for how the open-source database leader does business, pre-Sun and post-Sun.

Importantly, as Mickos calls out, it was Sun's acquisition that brought to a furious boil all the somewhat private tensions and passions that had always made MySQL tick, but which had simmered in the background:

[The Sun acquisition] brought out the passion in people inside and outside the MySQL ecosystem, and for the good and the bad of it, we had a year of fierce debates on free vs. paid, bugs vs. bugfreeness, to fork or not to, release frequency vs. community contributions - and generally on the governance of a leading free and open source software product that is owned by a corporation.

Not that this is anything new to MySQL. Over the years we have seen it as our duty to be a pioneer and to experiment. We know that open source is a smarter way to produce software, but we also know that a company must make money. As Steve O'Grady of Red Monk noted: "MySQL has never shied from being controversial, from being the iconoclast of the open source world."

All of this has paid off, for MySQL and for the open-source ecosystem of which it plays such a key part. Indeed, Gartner recently called out in its "The Growing Maturity of Open-Source Database Management Systems" report that 73 percent of surveyed enterprise buyers are using open-source databases, up from 49 percent the year before. That is amazing growth by any yardstick.

While some may justly worry that MySQL's commercialization may lead to less community involvement and impact on the open-source database, Mickos calls out that "with 5.1 the inflow of new bug reports has remained encouragingly stable," suggesting that MySQL's community remains very much engaged with Sun, the company, despite its release of commercial add-ons to its open-source database like Query Analyzer, part of MySQL Enterprise Monitor. You can track MySQL bugs online, something you won't see IBM or Oracle doing anytime soon.

What of Sun's MySQL database business? Glad you asked:

On the business side we have reported stronger sales growth as part of Sun. The bursting of the lending bubble and the ensuing financial crisis did initially affect us as customers pulled the brakes. But in the last weeks we have seen strong growth again with deals in high 7 figures. We signed some of our biggest deals with web properties, our biggest deal ever with an enterprise customer, and a major telecom deal.

This is the critical test. Nice as it is that Mickos and the MySQL team made a large pile of money from Sun, it would be a hollow victory if Sun could not, in return, reap commensurate benefits. A strong MySQL contributes to a strong Sun. It remains to be seen if $1 billion was a bit too rich, but Mickos seems fully engaged to help ensure Sun more than gets its money's worth.

[odubtaig]

I may not like their contributions policy but it's still good to see this.

[David Arbogast]

Radical Transparency? You can't get much more transparent than letting the community have a copy of the source code and accepting their contributions...

How about a little transparency into SUN??
Sun is in the tank... negative growth... thousands of additional job layoffs have yet to be announced... They are losing money on an operating basis... They don't make enough money on a day to day basis to service their debt... Sun's net margins are some of the worst in the industry!

But wait... Asay and Mickos aren't saying that this is good for Sun, are they? No, they are suggesting that this is good for MySQL.

Its nice to see that the open source religion is still going strong... What's good for the software is good, period. Even if the companies surrounding it melt into oblivion and more and more people lose their jobs.

Sun's efforts may be good for MySQL, but MySQL has certainly been no winning hand for Sun.

[odubtaig]

Did you even read this post? The last paragraph specifically?

You: "But wait... Asay and Mickos aren't saying that this is good for Sun, are they?"

Asay: "A strong MySQL contributes to a strong Sun. [...] Mickos seems fully engaged to help ensure Sun more than gets its money's worth."

That's an interesting square you're trying to circle there. You're not trying to shove an idealogical peg into a real hole are you?

[MSSlayer]

Another brain-dead response from a clueless business type.

[ITRebel]

The proof will be in their profitability. As all that he mentions is revenue. Revenue is the wrong marker. They have an uncanny resemblence to the failed dot coms of a decade ago. Large growth and revenue, but no profits.

Unless they make proprietary development a priority, to me their business model sounds like a house of cards. As all that it would take is one proprietary breakthrough technology to change the speed of queries dramatically. Suddenly everybody who has been chanting the religious mantra about the virtues of open source in database applications would be left in the dust. If he is going to stay in the game over any length of time, he needs to make proprietary development a priority also, as even traditional OSS companies like Red Hat are now agressively pursuing patents.

[MSSlayer]

LOL

Some rebel you are.

They don't need anything to be proprietary. You simple have no understanding of their business model. Red Hat is doing that to protect ideas from patent trolls not close anything up.

[ITRebel]

MSSlayer,

I know enough about their business model to know that they were never profitable as a private company and Sun's stock price has dropped from about 18 right before the buyout was announced to about 3 now. Please don't tell me that this drop in stock price has happened to all of Sun's competitors because this has been much, much, much more dramatic than the rest of their competitors. The MySQL executive continues to talk about all of these revenues, but let's finally see some profit and a stock price that goes up - otherwise it is very remindful of the dot coms.

I am only a rebel in that I need to point out the obvious. Some business model ......

[odubtaig]

Yes, I'm sure it's obvious to anyone who's never observed how a startup actually starts up or how long it takes for the average business just to break even.

In the meantime, your one man crusade is a nice reminder that there are people yet more arrogant, self-important and clueless than myself.

Thankyou.

You're still completely ignoring every single one of the many other reasons why Sun is doing badly (StarOffice, Sparc and Solaris sales, on top of the recession) in favour of your own personal ideologically driven hatred of F/OSS with all the reasoning skills and financial acumen of a toddler.

I think it's quite clear by now that you're view is driven entirely by inbuilt prejudice and not practicality or rational analysis. Like so many who call themselves rebels you're aping the voice of the fearful establishment. It wouldn't remotely surprise me if you worked for Oracle.

[Matt Asay]

I think ITRebel has a good point, but I wonder if the problem is with MySQL's/Sun's model (which has changed, so be careful not to call it a support model, which I'd agree is a weak model), or with Sun's market/cash position. MySQL's improvements to its business model are kicking in, earning it (i.e., Sun) more money. But it's not enough to make up for all the money Sun is losing on its old businesses.

So, the question is can open source (like MySQL) help Sun in time? It has certainly helped Novell, but it took years to turn the ship around and make the revenues big enough to overcome the bleeding in its traditional businesses. It also took a lot of money from Microsoft to plug the hole in the dam.

I'm optimistic that Sun's MySQL business is moving in the right direction and will be a net positive to the company. But I agree with you, ITRebel, that there is still *much* to prove.

[Penguinisto]

MySQL is a bit of an oddity, but the big idea is to partner with Sun to get stability and cash flow, while Sun makes money by integrating MySQL into its services line. Sort of like how Qt does the same by hanging out with Nokia.

Proprietization (in part or in whole) would kill MySQL outright.

If I want proprietary databases, I can go buy Oracle or MSFT SQL Server - both of which would give me (e.g.) two-way replication, and a ton of other features that MySQL currently does not have (or honestly, need).

It would also see a whole lot of people forking MySQL's open-source codebase, and continue giving away/working on the fork, ignoring MySQL the company. IOW, if MySQL went proprietary, they'd end up competing with their own product.

The only alternative MySQL would have is to build features that were proprietary (bi-directional replication, clustering software, etc), but these are features that quite frankly, very few MySQL users really need or use.

BTW - as for RedHat, the patent actions are self-defensive. Most of RedHat's patent portfolio goes into a common pool, that allow one and all to use the patents without royalty, so long as the products using those patents are open-source. IBM, Philips, NEC, Sony, and Novell also contribute to this pool: http://www.linuxdefenders.org/

[ITRebel]

Penguinisto,

Thanks for the informative post. I know about these patent pools, but the key is that not all of Red Hat's patent portfolio goes into this mix. Also, my understanding is that through other similar agreements, Microsoft also has access to Ithe patents of IBM, Sun and Nokia amongst others in this pool, so the "open source arch-enemy" actually has access to many of these same patents. I am sure that you are aware of this information in an article entitled: "Open source patent pool criticized". This article describes such patent pool agreements as similar to anti-nuclear war treaties that simply guard against massive mutual destruction. Here is the reference:

http://www.techspot.com/news/18357-open-source-patent-pool-criticised.html

The interesting question is what in Red Hat's patent portfolio is not in the common pool and why this is the case? There would seem to a proprietary reason for keeping patents out of this pool, but please correct me if I am mistaken.

[MSSlayer]

Yes, you are mistaken, and no you didn't know about the patent pool.

Of course Matt would agree with you since he is a clueless as you are.

[ITRebel]

MSSlayer,

Please respond specifically to what you disagree with in the article on patent pools that I reference or please tell me me how my reference to the effect of the MySQL purchase on Sun's stock price and their previous financials is mistaken or please tell us where Matt is clueless. Otherwise, your naysayer lack of information is actually what is clueless. Anybody can come on a blog without any information and say that everybody else is wrong. Provide information or say nothing.