Marten Mickos wasn't always enthusiastic about running a database company. Not even when his friends, who were then running the fledgling MySQL, offered him the job of CEO. He turned it down, as Al Riske discovered, in an interview he conducted with Sun's Database Group Senior VP.

But Mickos did keep a door open to his friends at MySQL, and when they need guidance in moving from a kitchen table operation to the big leagues, he provided it. In return, they once again offered him the job as CEO. This time he accepted.

Once Mickos was installed at MySQL, the company began building its business around a dual-licensing model that had originated with yet another open-source firm, Ghostscript, Riske writes.

The principle was simple, according to Mickos. MySQL was available with an open source license but only to buyers committed to operating open source themselves. The alternative was to buy a commercial license.

“I think it's perfect. That's how I operate in my life,” Mickos told Riske. “When you come to my home, I open my kitchen for you and you eat and drink whatever you like, but when I visit you I expect to do the same. So I'm a big believer in reciprocity.”

Cisco opted for a commercial license when they came to MySQL for a database to embed their intrusion detection device in. Not wanting to open source their own code, Cisco bought the commercial license.

This model worked fine until Zack Urlocker joined MySQL as marketing VP and raised the alarm. It just wouldn't scale, he contended. When software became a service delivered over the Internet, the model no longer applied, Mickos said.

That's when MySQL began developing a business model for those customers who did not distribute MySQL software but rather simply the outcome of the software. “If they have all the time in the world they probably won't buy from us, because they can do it themselves. But to those with more important things to do, we sell a subscription offering, which includes technology support, management tools, automation tools, deployment tools that just make life easier,” Mickos told Riske.

A big hurdle was overcome when Facebook decided to become a paying customer of MySQL, Mickos said, buying value offered for a fee, just as Sun now does.

“There was a decision in the spring to make sure all our open-source products have one part that is for the community, for building momentum, for getting developers excited, and then there is this value-add for people who are ready to spend money to save time,” Mickos says.

According to Riske, Mickos wants to be very clear that he sees open source as a better way to develop and distribute software. Even if some in the open-source world don't care about making money, Mickos is not one of them.

“We are building a software business. We are not building a marketing machine that can sell something else. We are building a software business. We are very happy when it has hardware drag and software drag and services drag, but we are not content to just be a lead-generation machine,” says the senior vice president of Sun's database group.

With MySQL, Mickos says, Sun now has a product that is both an alternative and a complement to databases produced by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and others.

“MySQL is the only major database in the world that was designed for the Internet. It was designed in 1995, when the Internet already existed. Whereas all the other products were created in an offline world. So this created major design differences. Maybe at the surface it looks similar. We have the same features. But still it's like we are an electric car and they are petrol cars,” Mickos says.

Can MySQL replace every legacy instance of Oracle in a company? No, Mickos concedes and adding that he tells such customers, "'We have one of the fastest, most reliable, most easy to deploy databases in the world, but, no, we cannot run exactly the same load and we are not intending to run the same load.'”

Riske writes that Mickos advises customers with large legacy applications to keep the database they have running but, come time to shift to the Web, MySQL is a better bet.

Corporations are going Web internally, Mickos told Riske. "Across everything. When they do that, we become relevant to them,” he says.

For More Information

Read the entire Al Riske interview with Marten Mickos. [...read more...]

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