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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.
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
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".'
PostgreSQL is a *far* superior database, and unfortunately despite various kinds of database abstraction layers for the popular programming languages out there, people still insist on writing open source apps that are soley tied to MySQL.
You know superios can be context specific. Of the two, MySQL is faster. This matters a lot when you just don't need the "functional superiority" of PostgreSQL.
And one thing.. PostgreSQL with its incredibleness, doesn't support something as basic as full text indexing. In MySQL creating searchable text is trivial. In PostgreSQL you need to extract keywords, create index tables, mix and match etc etc to end up with the same feature.