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MySQL Prepares To Go Public
prostoalex writes "MySQL CEO Marten Mickos told Computer Business Review the company plans to go public: 'Now entering its twelfth year, the company has built up just less than 10,000 paying customers, and an installed base estimated to be close to 10 million... When it does go public, MySQL will be one of only a handful of open source vendors to do so. Red Hat, VA Linux (now VA Software), and Caldera (now SCO Group) led the way in 1999 and 2000...'"
won't matter if they do, someone will fork the GPL version. ah the beauty of gpl. companys can totally fuck up a product and we will still get to use it as we please.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Thanks for the questions!
The customer count is over several years. Yes, the majority of our users choose not to pay. The current ratio is something like 1 in 1,000. But as you probably know as an open source user, there is great benefit to a project also from the ones who don't pay.
Those who pay do it for the value-add they receive: production support, scheduled binaries with only bug fixes, the monitoring and advisory servce, etc. From a business perspective the great thing is that the ratio of paid to non-paid is changing and our business is steadily growing.
We are proud at MySQL to build something that has great value to the FOSS communities and is a great business at the same time.
Sorry to hear that you don't like MySQL, but great to see that you nevertheless take time to read
Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB
Wow, lots of rage filled comments so far.
Not all public companies are worth as much as GE or WalMart. Vast numbers of public companies exist, and many are only worth a few million. 10k customers paying for support (we all know they need it) is still millions in revenue a year, more then enough to go public without being bogus.
Public != Billions.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I don't like that MySQL does not keep my data safely and securely out of the box. Some examples:
I can't take MySQL seriously until this changes. I understand that you have backward compatibility concerns, but that's life - you pay a price for the poor decisions you've made in the past. You might have to go through a long deprecation period before you can get rid of these knobs. At the very least, don't have them flipped this way unless I start mysqld with the --treat-my-data-as-garbage command-line option.
If you fix this fundamental problem, I'll be impressed. I may not use your product, but I will stop laughing at it.
MyISAM is certainly not a joke. Sure, it has its limitations, but for its niche, it works quite well for what we use it for. Bulk load performance makes for a great staging area when you load 250+ million records per day (and that includes everything else we throw at MySQL to process the data). The ability to choose engines optimized for the task at hand is powerful and we make use of a number of them in our design including MyISAM and INNODB. I feel no need to defend MySQL; it works.
The point the everyone seems to be missing with regard to stock holders is who actually gets to vote at the companies AGM. A large percentage of company chares in circulation are not owned by people, they are owned by investment companies (banks, etc) who get to block vote all the shares in one go.
For example:
Company A floats on the stock market and it share are purchased by Companies B (15%), C (10%), D(20%), E(6%) and a handful of smaller investors (49% total).
When at their AGM Company A wishes to appoint a new director they have to put it out to vote. But each person gets to vote according to the number of shares in Company A that they own. So if the directors of companies B,C,D and E get together in private and decide who they would rather put in charge, there is nothing all the smaller investors can do as even if they all voted the same way they would still only have 49%.
Now the numbers I quote above are a complete exageration but it usually amounts to the same thing in the real world. Its just that the other comanies would be made up of 10 - 20 investment houses (instead of B C D and E) and they would not initially all agree. So they would trade favours for voting the way another company would prefer in return for the same thing happening in reverse when a vote came up they veiwed as more important to their business. The have the opportunity to do this as they are still only 10 - 20 fundmanagers who probably drink at the same bar / club anyway.
Whereas the smaller investors are spread across a much wider geographical location and are much less likely to have the opportunity to meet. They are also less likely to trade favours the same way fundmanagers can as they probably dont own stock in such a wide range of companies so any favours on offer are less likely to be relevant.
This is usually the way things turn out because most of us do not own shares in a company directly, but our pensions and savings are invested on our behalf. In return for investing our money for us, the investment houses and banks get to use the vote that comes with the shares.
I dont read