Mårten Mickos
As the European Commission continues to evaluate the potentially deleterious effects of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems and its open-source MySQL database, concern is rising that delay will harm MySQL without helping competition.
One who shares this concern is former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos. On Thursday, Mickos sent a letter to Neelie Kroes, the European Union's competition commissioner, urging that the deal be approved for the good of the market and MySQL. He also spoke with CNET News' Stephen Shankland on Thursday.
Below is the edited full text of the letter.
Helsinki 8 Oct 2009
Mrs. Neelie Kroes
Commissioner for Competition
European Commission, J70
B-1049 Brussels/Brussel
BELGIQUE/BELGIE
Dear Commissioner Kroes,
I am writing to you regarding your review of Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems. As I understand it, the EU Commission is concerned about a risk of undue concentration of power in the database market. Having been the CEO of MySQL from 2001 to 2009, and built a business that was serving a new market unmet by Oracle and others, I can agree with the questions posed, but I do not share the concerns that have been expressed. In the following, I will explain why.
In brief, my reasoning is as follows:
- Oracle has as many compelling business reasons to continue the ramp-up of the MySQL business as Sun Microsystems and MySQL previously did, or even more.
- Even if Oracle, for whatever reason, would have malicious or ignorant intent regarding MySQL (not that I think so), the positive and massive influence MySQL has on the DBMS market cannot be controlled by a single entity--not even by the owner of the MySQL assets. The users of MySQL exert a more powerful influence in the market than the owner does.
Many expected Oracle to harm MySQL as far back as 2005, when they acquired the InnoDB storage engine that plays a crucial role for many MySQL customers. And yet Oracle increased their investment in InnoDB since that time, making MySQL a stronger player in the market.
For further detail on my views on Oracle's intent, please see this interview with me in Forbes Magazine in April 2009.
It may at first blush seem counterintuitive that control of the MySQL assets does not automatically bestow control of the MySQL installed base. But the free installed base of MySQL--enormous on a planetary scale--is voluntarily but not mandatorily coupled to the commercial market of MySQL. It produces huge benefits to the MySQL business, but it is not controlled by it.
Background
The impetus to write this letter comes from my concern with the talented teams of the MySQL business unit and of Sun Microsystems in general. I am also troubled by certain factual distortions about a subject matter that I am intimately familiar with: MySQL and its business model. Open-source business models are complicated and quite different, and it took many years to fully understand and shape the one of MySQL.
A Finnish citizen, I served as chief executive officer of MySQL from early 2001 to February 2008, when Sun acquired MySQL. After that, I served as senior vice president of the database group at Sun until the end of March 2009. Being the only person to have served as the CEO of MySQL and to have attended every board meeting ever held, I believe I have unique insights into these matters.
To be clear, I resigned from my position in March 2009, and I presently have no commercial or financial interests in the MySQL ecosystem, Sun, or Oracle (or any other vendor in the DBMS market, for that matter), other than my loyalty to Sun employees in general and the MySQL team in particular.
MySQL's Markets and Installed Base
MySQL is the world's most popular open-source relational database, and potentially the most popular relational database of all. It has an enormous influence and impact on the usage and the buying patterns of relational databases (also known as RDBMSs), in particular for Web applications. One might even state that the Internet would not be what it is today, were it not for MySQL. Staffed by a highly talented team of passionate employees, the Swedish company MySQL grew the MySQL business from a small one in 2001 to a massive one in 2008.
"MySQL" refers to two things. On the one hand, there is the huge (community) phenomenon MySQL...On the other hand, there is the business of MySQL...Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.
In this discussion, the term "MySQL" refers to two things. On the one hand, there is the huge phenomenon MySQL--an estimated 12 million active installations under a free and open-source software license, millions, if not tens of millions, of skilled users and developers, and tens of thousands of corporations who use MySQL one way or the other.
On the other hand, there is the business of MySQL, which is growing rapidly, thus rewarding the owners of the assets (currently Sun Microsystems).
Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.
What I mean is that the vast and free installed base of MySQL is using it of their own free choice, unencumbered by the vendor and under no obligation or restraint. That is the nature of open source. And conversely, the MySQL business is supporting the free installed base of MySQL (by improving the product) voluntarily and in the hope of deriving benefit from the installed base.
This is the paradox of an open-source business, and it took me a long time to truly understand how powerful a force it is. It is unlike any traditional business. The key point is that both the users and the vendors of open source are engaged in a powerful free-market dynamic that cannot be contained by any single entity.
It is in everybody's interest that the two sides of MySQL produce benefit for and derive benefit from each other. But neither group can mandate or control the other one. This is a core philosophy of open-source software and more generally of the "architecture of participation" (as defined by Tim O'Reilly). There is a mutually beneficial voluntary relationship, but there is no control by one group over the other. In more colloquial terms: the owners of MySQL cannot force MySQL users to pay up, and the nonpaying users cannot force the business to subsidize them.
Anyone acquiring the MySQL assets will therefore acquire an ability to control the business aspect, i.e., meaning how MySQL is licensed commercially, but only an opportunity (and no free reign) to derive benefit from the free user base.
This explains how the MySQL business can be valued highly in the market ($1 billion, when acquired by Sun in February 2008) while at the same time providing no way of controlling its installed base. This unusual relationship between market share and installed base is at the core of the topic. The market share is small but controllable, to some degree. The installed base is enormous but not controllable. The installed base is, and can be, hugely beneficial to the owner of MySQL, but only to the extent and for as long as this owner of MySQL enjoys the trust of the installed base.
To put it in numbers, it may be useful to see the usage of MySQL, as divided into three categories:
... Read moreOracle is determined to keep MySQL if it acquires Sun, but the reason likely has little to do with open source and everything to do with Microsoft. Oracle doesn't compete with open source. Not really. Open source is simply a means to an end, and in the case of MySQL, a means to denting Microsoft's rising strength in emerging markets where Oracle's expensive database technology doesn't resonate.
In fact, in a recent survey by Evans Data, over 50 percent of developers in the emerging markets of China, India, Eastern Europe, and Latin America use Microsoft's SQL Server, compared to 46 percent using MySQL.
Oracle database technology? It's used, but not nearly as extensively.
MySQL gives Oracle a club with which to beat Microsoft. It's not about open source. It's about the MySQL developer community and its competitive price point, two things that Microsoft also has going for it. Arguably, though, open source provides Oracle a strong competitive differentiator against Microsoft in these markets.
Even so, I think we'll eventually see open source aiding both sides in this battle, as Microsoft learns to drop its acrimonious stance toward open source and instead strategically embrace it, as IBM, Oracle, and others have done before it.
Oracle can't afford to abandon MySQL. It's the key to unlocking its ability to effectively compete with Microsoft in tomorrow's big markets.
Net Applications has finally published its browser market share numbers for July, and the results are surprising. Given European summer holidays and Mozilla Firefox's large user base in Europe (35 percent market share), Firefox should be seeing a significant decline in market share through the summer months.
But it isn't.
Instead, as detailed below, Firefox market share continues to hold steady at 22.47 percent, while Internet Explorer also treads water at 67.68 percent. Only Safari (4.07 percent) and Google Chrome (2.59 percent) show appreciable, sustained growth over the past few months.
Browser Market Share Data, July 2009
(Credit: Net Applications)With Firefox recently surpassing its one-billionth download, we should see rising market share in the fall, unless back-to-school PC sales give IE a bump.
But I don't think IE will win over the student crowd, which is more likely to be a Mac (Safari) crowd than a Microsoft one. And so I suspect we'll continue to see Firefox (along with Safari and Chrome) rising against IE.
After all, eventually even the Griswalds come home and get back to work. When they do, more and more will be using Firefox.
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Microsoft's Internet Explorer's market share is absolutely falling. The question is, by how much?
I've reported before that Internet Explorer (IE) drops 5 percent market share points each year, while Mozilla Firefox gains 5 percentage points per year. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that IE's market share may be dropping more precipitously than previously reported, falling to 60 percent share in June 2009 instead of the 68 percent share expected.
Or is it?
The answer may depend on the source of the information, and the reliability of its data. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler uses StatCounter data to discern a 60 percent share for IE but, as ZDNet's Larry Dignan points out, this data may not hold up.
For Microsoft's sake, it had better hope not, as this chart compiled by Dotzler shows:
Internet Explorer market share falling faster than reported?
(Credit: Asa Dotzler (Data from StatCounter))That's not the sort of chart with which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer likes to sweeten his coffee in the morning.
Net Applications, the other big source of browser market share data, still hasn't posted its results for June 2009, noting that it is trying to make sense of "some significant variations in browser and operating system statistics."
Given that market share data isn't a one-month phenomenon, it's not necessarily helpful to celebrate or fret over the June data, especially since much of the market share share data is going to get skewed in the summer months, anyway. For example, given Firefox's disproportionately large following in Europe, coupled with Europe's disproportionately long holiday season in the summer, I'd expect to see Firefox drop some percentage points against IE through August, only to rebound strongly in September.
Regardless of short-term variations, one thing seems clear: Firefox is gaining on IE. Microsoft spent too long enjoying its browser dominance, and not enough time innovating. It's starting to pump R&D dollars into IE again, but it's not yet clear whether its monolithic approach to browser development can compete in the long term with Mozilla's community-developed Firefox.
Microsoft needs to compete again, or risks seeing even StatCounter's data understate just how quickly it's falling.
Mozilla, for its part, faces a host of new challenges. It can't afford to waste much time with back slaps and high-fives. The browser has become the center of computing. Microsoft isn't going to give up easily, nor will Google or Apple.
Game on.
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It's not exactly the Sundance Film Festival, but Red Hat's new Red Hat Stories film series is setting the standard for technology marketing through film.
These aren't product pitches. Instead, they pitch "the Red Hat way" of doing things, attempting to broaden the appeal well beyond bits and bytes of operating systems and application servers.
While you'll find the films on YouTube, Red Hat doesn't want you to label them as "videos." As Red Hat's Chris Grams explains:
I use the word "film" rather than video on purpose because it better captures the spirit of what we are trying to do with digital media at Red Hat. Films are what you make when you are capturing stories. Videos are what you make when you are selling your stuff. So we aspire to film, certainly with our most strategic work, but sometimes settle for video when the project demands it.
Red Hat is careful to pitch product strategy when positioning its products: you're buying freedom and its attendant value, not simply Linux. These short films do much the same: they're surprisingly interesting to watch, and they push the audience to think beyond the simple questions "will it run?" and "how much does it cost?"
See for yourself:
Grams suggests that "the combination of a talented group of internal storytellers and a passionate group of smart employees with something to say can create some pretty effective communication." He's right. Red Hat continues to set the standard for how an open-source company--or any company--can reach and potentially inspire its audience.
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For years, open-source advocates like myself have fixated on freedom. "Don't get locked in!" has been our rallying cry to the teeming masses, yearning to be free from the shackles of proprietary lock-in. "Stop feeding your firstborn sons to the beast in Redmond!"
At Tuesday's Open Source Forum in London, however, "freedom" took a back seat to cost reduction, performance, and IT efficiency. Not surprisingly, the message was even more warmly received, and probably will result in far greater uptake of open-source software than the freedom cry.
The reason is simple: people get paid to get work done. The chief information officer of Company X has a job to do, and that job doesn't entail weekday freedom fighting, battling software overlords down on Canary Wharf. Rather, her job is to make the IT trains run on time, and while open source likely plays an increasingly prominent role in this, its importance has less to do with high ideals than high performance.
Open source, in other words, is winning because it works, not because it's saving the planet.
Some persist in selling technology, open source and otherwise, based on ideology. That's why Opera's "Freedom!" message for Opera Unite falls so flat, as Chris Messina points out:
What I find so fascinating about this marketing message is that it presumes that owning one's own data and "connecting directly" with friends is somehow relevant to people - as though it's a big problem that people have been complaining about for years, and that Opera has finally answered the call.
But I think they're missing the big picture here - or intentionally obscuring it -which is that, while the idea of owning your own data may be attractive to neo-libertarians and open source geeks - most people really don't care and are happy to outsource storage of their data to someone else who can be responsible for backing up their data and fending off hackers. 200 million Facebook users can't be wrong, right?
The appeal for this sort of message is so limited as to be nearly useless. Tim O'Reilly recently suggested that open sourcerers often fixate on the wrong thing (licensing), overlooking the real promise and mechanics for ensuring openness on the Web (data, APIs, participation, etc.).
Add to that the wrong message ("You have nothing to lose but your chains!") and you have a recipe for reaching a niche audience. Open source can do better.
Freedom is important, but if Iran has taught us anything, it's that there are far more important freedoms in this world than the right to modify software.
It's time for the marketing message around open source to move beyond "and justice for all." Cost savings, performance boosts, etc. are far more relevant to likely adopters of open source. Such open-source customers are less concerned by the intricacies of open-source business models than they are by tangible returns on their open-source investments.
It's the new open-source pragmatism. Try it, you might like it.
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Linux has been growing in importance for years in the darkened server closets. In the server world, Linux's cost and performance benefits have trumped its early weaknesses (Ease of use, etc.), making Linux the heir apparent to the Unix throne.
But that's the server, where geeks write software for other geeks. In the consumer world of personal computers and mobile devices, however, Linux hasn't fared particularly well precisely because the developers of Linux differ so markedly from the vast majority of the user population.
Linux developers, in other words, scratch very different "itches" from those plaguing most would-be Linux users.
It seems clear to me that, as Bill Weinberg astutely argues, the way forward for Linux is not in replicating Microsoft's desktop dominance, but rather in forging a new, consumer-friendly mobile Linux experience, one focused on the youth that are growing up mobile.
This "way" is being paved by Intel, Canonical, Novell, and other companies that have significant experience writing software for normal users, and not merely the alpha geeks of Linux. I've spent the past two weeks fiddling with different variants of Linux-based Netbooks, in particular the Linux Foundation's Moblin Beta 2 (Developed by Intel and Novell) and Canonical's Ubuntu 9.04 Remix for Netbooks, and I believe they are onto something.
The first thing that struck me when using Moblin is how it breaks new ground in defining a new personal computer experience, one designed for the narrow (hardware) confines of a Netbook but offering a limitless portal to social networking and a broad Web experience beyond.
This is perhaps why Acer has committed to Moblin in a big way, and why Canonical is joining up with Moblin, as are others.
As for Ubuntu, it's an even tighter user experience (though, to be fair to Moblin, it's still in beta and so many of its rough edges will be smoothed over by general release, I assume). This isn't surprising given Ubuntu's singular focus on usability. It doesn't require any specialized knowledge of Linux though it does give the user too much information on what's happening under the hood. The lay user simply doesn't care. We just want it to work.
The experience hasn't been without its difficulties. My experience with Ubuntu, for example, was plagued by constant nagging to install yet another package to be able to play proprietary codecs. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols suggests that this problem is going away, but it can't leave fast enough. It's asking way too much to expect consumers to have to work in order to watch a YouTube video.
We are users, after all, not developers.
Slowly but surely, however, vendors are getting the Linux experience "right" for Netbooks and other mobile devices. I've been leaving my Intel-loaned Acer Aspire One Netbook around where my kids, ages four through 12, will open it up and experiment. Each one has quickly managed to find the games in Moblin and Ubuntu, and my older children were quickly browsing the Web and even typing up school reports. In minutes. With no coaching.
To me, this suggests the path forward for Linux is in new, as yet underdeveloped markets like mobile, and for an as yet under-monopolized audience: youth. My kids have grown up with Macs, but they're hardly grown up yet. Their experience with computers has been as much about mobile phones as laptops.
They are the most mobile-inclined generation the world has yet seen, making them an ideal target for new Linux-based mobile devices. As the Bible notes in Proverbs 22:6:
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Children's conceptions of what a computer must look like and feel like have yet to calcify into a Windows mold. They are the audience to win for those vendors interested in dominating the next decade of personal computing.
Old dogs strain to learn new tricks, making the Microsoft-conceived desktop a poor target for Linux vendors. The market is mobile. The market is children.
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Apple recently redesigned the tab system for its Safari 4 browser, placing tabs at the very top of the browser screen. As an occasional Safari user, I find the new tab placement confusing. Half the time I forget that the tabs are even there. It seems like much has been given up for very little benefit. Apparently, I'm not alone in my complaints and confusion about the updated tab placement.
Even more confusing to me, however, is why Apple decided to change tabs in the first place. Did you request it? I know I didn't.
This, however, is the point. Apple doesn't ask. Sometimes, this is a very positive thing as Apple has a good track record of redefining the industry standard (e.g., iPhone's touch screen).
But sometimes it's a negative, as here.
Now consider the open-source alternative, Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla is also considering changing the way it does tabs, but it's going about it in a very un-Apple-esque fashion:
It's asking its user community to conceptualize the next generation of tabbed browsing in Firefox.
The Mozilla Labs Design Challenge 2009 is focused on answering the question, "Reinventing Tabs in the Browser - How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?" It's an important question, given the central role Web browsers play in computing today, and it's equally important that Mozilla wants to improve the tabbed-browsing experience by looking to its community base, rather than assuming the full burden of design and development itself.
Mozilla, in some ways, is the antithesis of Apple. The open-source bazaar competing against the Apple cathedral, and doing quite well.
Intriguingly, Microsoft probably will fall somewhere in the middle. Microsoft has always been fairly community-oriented, with a thriving partner ecosystem. As Microsoft seeks to revive its sagging (but still strong) browser fortunes, I suspect it will bridge the divide between Firefox and Safari by keeping Internet Explorer (IE) closed, but encourage a community of extensions--open source and proprietary--that will make for a richer browser experience.
This is the approach Microsoft is now taking with its CRM and SharePoint products, and I believe it's a strategy Microsoft will increasingly adopt as it seeks to embrace the best of both open-source and proprietary worlds.
Safari, the ultimate proprietary browser. Firefox, the ultimate open-source browser. And Internet Explorer, the ultimate mixed-source browser?
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The Web browser market has been undergoing tectonic shifts for the past six years, with Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) dropping 10 percentage points in market share every two years while Mozilla's Firefox gains 10 percentage points every two years. These trends are called out by Mozilla's Asa Dotzler, and they suggest that as early as January 2013 we could see Firefox surpass IE in market share if the trend continues:
(Credit:
Asa Dotzler (Data from Net Applications))
A larger version of the chart can be found here.
Firefox's growth raises all sorts of questions about how proprietary software vendors can and should compete with open-source products in the future, but for now it creates a massive problem for Microsoft. If Microsoft loses its grip on the Web browser market, will this also injure its efforts to become relevant on the Web?
Dotzler notes that "browser releases aren't having any major impact on the macro trends," which could suggest that Microsoft won't be able to stem the tide rising against IE simply by churning out a better browser. Instead, it may need to turn to plan B.
There is a plan B, right?
I'm not so sure. Historically, Microsoft would have dealt with such a slide in market share by tying products together such that competition was crippled but its market share was protected. With intense scrutiny from Europe and a renewed threat of such from U.S. regulators, Microsoft's wiggle room doesn't allow much monopolistic wiggling.
Microsoft, in other words, may be stuck with good old-fashioned competition, which doesn't bode well for it, as the Net Applications data suggests.
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In the past two years, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has bled 12 percentage points in market share, from 78.28 percent to 66.82 percent, according to data from Net Applications, while the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser has leaped nearly 7 percentage points, from 15.49 percent to 22.05 percent. Meanwhile, Apple's Safari has nearly doubled its market share, to 8.23 percent, and Google's Chrome has grown to 1.23 percent.
Microsoft can't be happy.
As I wrote last week, the more browser market share Microsoft loses, the easier it becomes for it to also lose operating-system market share. Indeed, over the same two-year period, Microsoft Windows has lost five percentage points in market share while Apple's Mac OS X has gained more than three percentage points and Linux has more than doubled its share.
The browser, quite simply, makes the operating system much less relevant to the computing experience. This is why Apple and Google continue to invest heavily in their respective browser initiatives: the browser is the key to operating-system disruption.
For this same reason, however, both would do better to invest in Firefox, the "Linux of browsers." In some ways, the browser efforts of Apple and Google are much like the Unix efforts of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems: they threaten to splinter the browser counterattack on Microsoft rather than solidify it.
Common investment in Firefox, however, would leave the industry better off, just as common investment in Linux has. Firefox, for its part, is thriving on its own. IE lacks the community flair that makes Firefox so appealing. Just imagine what it could do with the resources of Apple and Google behind it.
Microsoft probably has had, and still has, nightmares about that scenario.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
