Marten Mickos to leave Sun in reorg
Marten Mickos, former MySQL chief executive and current senior vice president of Sun Microsystems' database group, is transitioning out of the company in a planned reorganization.
Marten Mickos
(Credit: Sun Microsystems)I reached Mickos this morning for confirmation: he is definitely leaving. This move is not prompted by weakness in MySQL's business, which just closed an exceptional quarter, as he told me by phone.
"There is nothing in the MySQL business that is prompting me to leave," Mickos said. "Business is great. We just closed a multimillion-dollar deal recently that confirms much of the momentum we've made. We just closed our best quarter ever."
But Mickos grew disaffected with the larger bureaucracy that Sun brought to MySQL's business, a factor hinted at in a staff e-mail he sent out earlier this week:
I have made a decision to resign from Sun Microsystems. It's a personal decision that I made without anyone influencing me one way or the other (except perhaps my wife).
My personality is such that I love the challenge of an unproven value proposition, and I love being the top policymaker, building new things. I feel that together, we have accomplished the task set by the owners in 2001, and I am now stepping aside to let the strong managers of the group take over and continue the ambitious business ramp-up.
What Mickos doesn't say in the staff letter, but which I sensed in my conversation with him, is frustration at Sun's bureaucracy. As one of the most foundational personalities in open-source business, Mickos should have been given free rein to change Sun's fortunes. I don't think that he was given that freedom, based on other conversations I've had with Sun executives, and this clearly led to his desire to leave Sun.
Letting Mickos go is one of the worst decisions Sun has made. It is likely to lead to an exodus among MySQL's deep talent pool. Mickos was the backbone of MySQL's rising revenues, as an open-source pragmatist and visionary. He was the face of MySQL, but also of the rising open-source industry.
Mickos' departure comes on the heels of the resignation of MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius, but the difference here is that Widenius has been somewhat disconnected from MySQL decision making for some time; Mickos has been at the heart of it.
Sun will feel the loss of Mickos. Its open-source rebirth was just given a massive blow.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 





I guarantee that he regrets selling his baby out.
I don't think he is bummed out.
It must be remembered, that Marten Mickos did NOT make MySQL a US$1BN company. Marten and crew made a very good small company (What US$40M?) with a large but yet unrealised (financially) customer base. A true startup in the .COM sense of the word.
It is a loss to see Marten take the golden exit, but it is a personal choice and not a reflection on Sun. He likes to start things new and decided not to challenge his talent on a bigger task.
OpenSource is a hot ticket and he is a brand name. A rockstar in the industry. There is lots more short-term money to me made off that stardom before the shine begins to wane.
While there will be some engineering talent lost with Monty leaving, I suspect that there will be some neutral ground found to development the MySQL server now that enough personalities have left the building. Looking around at what is left of my fellow managers within Sun that came from MySQL, I don't see many who are ready to leave just yet.
Cheers,
-Brian
Marten has always been a great leader and vocal advocate for the success of the little guy.
His track record stands for being highly successful in achieving the set goals.
I wish him well in his next pursuit and would welcome the opportunity to work with him again, having worked at MySQL, leaving at Sun acquisition due to disagreement in employee agreement requirements.
the engineering organization will be in good hands reporting to Karen Padir. We got to know her during the due diligence process and in subsequent cooperation with Glassfish and Sun's identity manager software. She's a good engineering manager and has a clear understanding of managing people and processes.
--Zack
Phrases like "10000000% untrue." just utterly destroy your credibility. "Ten Million Percent Untrue". If you would like to refute a point. please do so.
Can someone please *explain* the rationale behind Sun's acquisition of Cobalt? And how was Cobalt integrated into Sun?
There's no conspiracy here. If I'd sold out for what he has, I'd do exactly the same.
Purchase Price: $1 Billion
Getting to leave and do it all over again: Priceless
In the meantime Sun are left with a pile of excrement that doesn't even scale on their own hardware
Marten alienated a lot of folks inside MySQL, and a few of us are pretty happy he's moving on.
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