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Ask MySQL's CEO About Running a Free Software Business
There have been so many articles written about the perils, pitfalls, and possible rewards of running a business based on free or open source software that we can't possibly link to them all. Instead, let's ask MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos how to make money with a company based on free software, because he runs a company that is almost always touted as one of the world's greatest free software (business) successes. You may want to read some of these interviews with Mårten before you come up with your own questions in order to avoid duplication, but other than that suggestion and the usual Slashdot interview rules, ask whatever you like, however you like.
In your eyes, what's the biggest problem with MySQL? More specifically, what leaves market share room for Oracle & your competitors? Do you even see yourself as having any competitors since your product is free?
My work here is dung.
How do you fight the perception that MySQL is not suitable for 'the real world' because it is free?
Dark Reflection
What are some of the "business strategies" you use to make money off of a freely available open-source product? How do they differ/compare with tradional strategies of selling a non-opensource or freely available product?
-- Humans, because the hardware IS the software.
In a market where people are just looking for stability, simplicity & scalability, where do you turn for innovation in your products? Is there a lot of research and development towards new features and completely new products in MySQL's community or do you aim primarily to do one thing well? How do you influence the direction of this research in such a large open source project? Do you attempt to add direction at all?
My work here is dung.
Your website touts you as having the lowest defects per KLOC by up to 12 times the industry standard, what do you attribute as the leading factor to your success in this respect? Since cold cash is the traditional method, how do you incentivise code quality in an open source product?
My work here is dung.
In your five years as MySQL CEO, what has been your proudest moment? Do you find it difficult to lead a company based on a product that belongs to a community? Do you ever experience any fallout/backfire from running your company on such a business model?
My work here is dung.
When you plan your software product roadmaps, what feature requests do you pay more attention to? Enterprise customers want scalability, reliability, redundancy, and security; but some database programmers are looking for features such as solid transaction support, stored procedures, and more functions. How do you rank which feature requests get attention first?
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Sounds like you're complaining about phpBB not MySQL, not to mention the standard troll of "its insecure because anybody can read the source".
There's plenty of companies out there that offer support for MySQL. Sure you got to pay for it, but if you used a closed system, you'd be paying for it even if you didn't need it.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
When will you bring the company public?
One of the most common complaints I've heard about the business model of profiting on support for a product, is that it provides motivation to keep the product from becoming very user friendly. After all, if the product is too easy to use, who will pay for support? In my own experience, I've seen a lot of companies that consider support to be insurance, and don't use it for help with installation, configuration, or to overcome usability issues so much as a way to cover their asses in case something goes very wrong. Do a lot of your customers use support to overcome usability problems and if so, does this de-motivate you to solve other usability issues?
To convince a large company to shell out a large amount of dollars to support something that's free? Especially considering all the new enterprise-friendly features that are being added in 5.0 and 5.1 like NDB. Do you have any advice to offer or arguments that work better than others? Do larger companies quibble about the fact that it's free, or do they try for a break in the price? Or are you more into licensing those mysql users, selling them value-added once they are already using the product and all the features, just adding support, expert advice and "certified binaries"?
To avoid asking something that's already been answered, here's a synopsis of some of his more recent interviews.
In Guy Kawasaki's Blog, he's asked:
1. How do you make money with an Open Source product?
2. What changes in the Open Source community's attitude have you encountered since you decided "to build a company" around MySQL?
3. Do you compete head to head with Oracle or do you have different customers?
4. What's the biggest MySQL DB?
5. What's the weirdest use of MySQL?
6. What's the most "mission critical" use of MySQL?
7. How does a company controls what's happening to its product when the Open Source community is doing the programming and testing?
8. Is Open Source hindering innovation because it's one thing to debug an existing product but it's another to design a new one?
9. Who fixes the most bugs?
10. If MySQL ceased to exist as an organization, would MySQL the product continue?
In InfoWorld, he's asked:
1. Recently, a number of open-source developers have expressed their unhappiness with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the second draft of GPLv3. Are you concerned about a potential forking of the license as some people stick with GPLv2 and others move to GPLv3?
2. How do you decide when MySQL needs to develop new features for the database and when to rely on the open-source community for those innovations?
3. So, is open source then a more forgiving environment than the proprietary software world?
4. What's ahead in 2007 for MySQL?
5. What's the latest news on Falcon, the transactional database engine being developed by database architect Jim Starkey who joined MySQL in February?
6. Is MySQL's current dominance of the open-source database market ever a cause for concern?
In Forbes, he's asked:
1. How is open source software influencing what the bigger tech giants like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft will do in the next year?
2. Do open source firms that sell to large, proprietary software companies risk being dubbed sellouts by the community that's helped them develop their software?
3. How do Oracle's recent open source acquisitions affect MySQL?
4. Is Oracle more of a threat now?
5. What is MySQL's workforce like?
6. MySQL recently took funding from Red Hat, Intel and SAP. What's the strategy here?
7. Is there an IPO for MySQL in the future?
In LXer, he's asked:
1. What are your short and long term goals do you have for the MySQL database system?
2. Realistically where do you think you will pick up quick conversions to enhance your immediate market share from your competitors? Later, how much market share must MySQL commercial versions have to pick up to have long-term viability?
3. If you see your main opportunity is in the replacement of Oracle installations does MySQL match or exceed the forte of Oracle in the transaction per second processing? Are you now aimed at the lower end of the Oracle market installations? What will it take to be really competitive with Oracle at the upper end of the scale?
4. If you see your natural market as the range SQL Server is now aimed at, small medium business and departmental installations, can you match their ease of administration? If not what is the salient argument for such companies to install MySQL over the competition? Since you are primarily aimed at the market willing to pay for your enhancements and support, do you see any advantage in offering a MySQL product that will undercut MySQL server from below?
5. What trade offs have had to be made to make MySQL 5.0 commercial version more feature rich and robust?
6. Where do you see competition arising from for pursuing the paths to th
Why is MySQL's justification of claiming the GPL applies to the MySQL wire level protocol itself?
You may want to read some of these interviews with Mårten before you come up with your own questions in order to avoid duplication...
*snicker*
Your company is one of the few that has made open source into a legitimate business model. What has made you succeed where others have failed?
Let me start by stating that I use MySQL for numerous intensive "enterprise" applications, so I don't intend this question to sound as critical as it probably does, but . . .
Does MySQL AG pay for the intensive promotion it receives in Linux Journal similar publications ? By this I mean the fact that every single article about anything that uses a database mentions MySQL, when you would expect an occasional sqlite or PostgreSQL, even disregarding technical advantages MySQL might have.
It might be that the publications lean towards MySQL without your direct influence, because you advertise with them or simply due to the preferences of editors and authors, of course. But if it is a conscious and organized bias I would like to know.
Again, this question is asked out of curiosity and not meant to be critical -- I work as an independent contractor, and I will spend the next several weeks helping a customer upgrade dozens of mysql servers to version 5, and migrate data -- I like MySQL, and it makes it possible for me to make money while playing with computers !
Were they releasing a closed source application that used MySQL's GPL'd libraries ?
If you google search on it, various sites refer to it as "shareware", which usually does not mean open source.
I believe that MySQL AG offers a copy of their libraries that is not under the GPL, but you have to pay. So if you are making a closed source application which you will sell, you might have to front more money per copy than the shareware MysqlFront was generating. Perhaps MysqlFront asked for a better deal and didn't get it.
This doesn't fully explain the situation (as noted by the linked article), but it does at least provide a bit more info:
o nt-discontinued.html
http://chisflorinel.blogspot.com/2006/09/mysql-fr
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
What other killer open source app would compliment MySQL and kill the pay for competition?
You give MySQL away for free, and sell an enhanced version also. How do you convince the bank manager/other investors to give you money to start a for-profit business, based on such a model?
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
Dude, I'd give you mod points if I could. According to your link it's still going strong under the name HeidiSQL. I just downloaded the RC3 on their site and it's really good. Thanks for finding the link! :)
Yeah, I saw that and thought that might be of help to some one. There's got to be more client guis for MySql out in the wild though. My is like the most popular OS rdbms around.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
it's horribly insecure since everyone can see the source code
LOL someone on slashdot believes in the "security through obscurity" paradigm.
make new product
give it away fro free
????
profit!
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
What is your golf handicap?
Oh, and if you could be beat up by any super hero of your own choice, which super hero would that be?
(Come on guys, I know you want to know the answer to the last one).
are you really open source? its lovely that one can look at the source,
and that its gpld, but in order to get to the mainline, one must agree
to a 'contributors license' which assign all rights to mysql ad.
a bit of a dodge?
I like sqlyog. being able to use odbc sources to copy tables from any odbc compliant database and create jobs to do it scheduled is a great feature.
Hello Mårten,
First, congratulations on MySQL's market capitalization! My question is:
I have been working part time for about 6 years on software for text/data mining and general semantic information extraction. Almost all of my development is in Common Lisp, but I have ported little bits to Java and released that under the GPL in the past. I view this as a small, niche market, not like MySQL. What do you think that chances are for making money on GPLing a niche product?
MySQL is very widely used so if you capture commercial use icensing costs for a small percent of users, you do very well. For my software, with luck perhaps a few hundred companies a year might start adopting my product. Does it seem like wishful thinking for me to use a GPL based business model like MySQL's?
I want my customers to have my source code for a lot of reasons, but I would also like to capture revenue. I might just end up going to market as a proprietary product that incidently includes source code, with licensing that prohibits redistribution to non-customers.
Thanks for your help,
Mark
I know that know you probably make money from the revenue of the company, but the one thing that's never clear to me with companies getting VC funding is how is that funding distributed?
Was it considered that they're paying you for the idea of MySQL, so you get to keep all the money?
Was it 100% for the company so you only get your salary and % of revenue?
How do you determine your salary/compensation?
Is there anything to stop someone from:
a) reverse engineering the protocols and creating their own closed source libraries to access the database
(As a corollary to this, if GPL software can claim this, what is to stop, say, Microsoft from imposing punative costs on 3rd party software that attempts to interoperate with its own servers and/or clients?)
b) modify the older LGPL library to bring it up to date with the current database? Though the changes would have to be released, the code that accesses it would not... if I understand it correctly.
c) using one of the existing modified-LGPL or Closed Source libraries?
If it is not possible to do this, why? If the mere deployment of the database or inter-operability with it becomes grounds for being compelled to open source everything (or potentially be compelled to pay exorbitant fees) which in any shape, way, or form builds upon GPL software, then is there not a real danger for any more conventional (closed source) software company to potentially have their business model be destroyed overnight at the whim of the open source developers or the dual-licensed software/support company? How is a commercial software company supposed to port their software to, say, the Linux platform without facing this kind of risk?
To be clear, I am not opposed to a hybrid licensing model. I can see the advantages for various parties, namely, Open Software developers and the MySQL AB. Providing everyone behaves reasonably and consistently, I see this as being a workable system. However, I can also see great risk for businesses that wish to build upon open source software if a reasonable licensing structure is not available (or continued) that permits closed source development.
What proportion of active MySQL users pay for service, and what is the average income per user?
Prolog rules
How can I get paying customers without talking to people, without figuring out what other people want, and without having to try very hard at anything? Because that's what I want.
...open source developers get paid..is with the freely offered "currency" of other code shared from other open source developers.
The code itself is best used in other, more traditional business. Software is a tool, not the business itself, it is the tool to do business with.
I know some (quite a few, most maybe) coders want to "make money", (the other more commonly used term for currency), with offering free tools "for sale" in some form, and here are the questions now- wouldn't it be better in the long run to emphasize to coders that the true value of the code-tool they have with open source is to be using it in other projects, and make your money with those other, traditional business endeavors and projects? You are already being "paid" once quite handsomely getting your hands on other's tools, shouldn't that be enough, and then forge ahead and work for your normal paycheck elsewhere, using those tools? Is the true long lasting value of "open" source even understood by those who use it all the time?
Can you list a general set of rules / goals that you set forth for your company and always tried to abide by? If so were these key to the success to your company? Thx, Blake
I think you got the last 3 letters of truth wrong and spelled it troll ;) It's completely true unless the program is designed with 100% unbreakable foolproof security that you can't break even when U know exactly how it works, which ppl keep saying is impossible. Though to the other replier, the only 100% secure security isn't Fort Knox style where you just try to keep people out through mounds of security and say "now it's invincible." That's an expensive waste of resources. Think of how much easier it'd be if they hid the gold in a cave and just set traps and threw away the diagram saying where they all are. It looks like a clear path to what you want but then BAM you're caught in a trap. If they applied that idea to software security, it would be nearly perfect but they still would have to not see the source code. Even the best hacker in the world would fall for traps. I use a trap on my own web server with a fake, unlinked, free floating text file named "server_password" in a directory somewhere and purposely left directory listing enabled so effectively anyone who accesses that file had to have listed that directory, something no normal person would do because normal ppl don't just go poking around. I ban anyone's IP who accesses that file and you'd be surprised how many do per month. It's worked great so far. With this style, nobody would want to hack anything because they wouldn't know if the hole was left there as a trap or not.
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
I work for a good sized business and looked at using the Cluster Jumpstart but when I said told my boss the cost and that we'd have to play for flights he laughed at me, even though we're starting to really use mySQL pretty seriously now for some stuff.
With costs for things like this and gold/platinum support also relatively high on a per server basis it seems there's a wide gap between community based support which costs nothing and enterprise support which appears somewhat pricey.
How do you draw the line for paid vs free support particularly since a lot of SME's are using mySQL and may be unable to afford it? Was it a conscious decision to pitch it high to display value in the product?
When will the world get to the next big paradigm in database technology. As in, past the relational model.
When and why did you decide to get in bed with the SCO Group?
_ 948.html
As announced in your September 2005 press release: http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/news/article
I'd say MySQL vs PostgreSQL is the VHS vs Betamax all over again. MySQL is good enough for 99% of what people use it for. It might not be as good as PostgreSQL, but it's more than good enough.
I'll admit I'm pretty fickle though, and I use MySQL because I think their documentation site is a lot better and the command line client is far nicer than Postgre's. Poor benchmarks for me to use, but hey.. it's all about the gloss.
I've never used this front-end for MySQL. I'm a big fan of phpMyAdmin. How does it compare to phpMyAdmin?
I was going to build a very large database and don't need to many features. MySQL seems fine in that respect. I was wondering if the cluster version of MySQL scales as good as Oracle. I know your answers should be biased, but MySQL seems to target the middle market. Should I go with a different product for a very large database?
They're quite different beasts, I suppose the main advantage MySQL Front offers is that it's a Windows app, so it's a bit more responsive than doing things via the browser, particularly if there is a lot of data to load (although obviously with either it's down to transfer speeds a lot of the time). But there are little things with MySQL Front that I appreciate, like being able to edit fields by just double clicking on them (like a spreadsheet), with phpMyAdmin you have to highlight rows and hit the edit button to load a new page to edit data. Also you can just quickly right click and export to CSV or SQL on result sets in MySQL Front which is quite handy sometimes.
I would be happy using either of them really, but I'm quite comfortable with MySQL Front now, and know all the features it has. Obviously it's not platform independent like phpMyAdmin so you're stuck using it on Windows (I assume it won't work under Wine, I've not tried it) but as long as that's not a problem it's worth giving a try IMHO.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hello.
Given that MySQL in recent years has declared a loss to the tax authorities which has grown at about the same pace as the workforce has expanded, when do you think the company will show a sustained profitability?
(The declaration for the year 2004, which is the most recent made public, was a loss at about 8 000 000 Euros, and the total amount of losses is about 15 000 000 Euros.)
Turkish Hackers attacked my website. Can you make them stop?