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...'"

Comments

two out of 3 aint bad

[macadamia_harold]

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...

Well, as long as Darl McBride doesn't get his hands on the company they should be ok.

amen

[battery111]

I think it's awesome when open source companies go public. It allows them to get enough capital to truly innovate, and help prove to the unbelievers that open source IS a viable, successful way to make outstanding software. I hope more open source companies continue this trend.

Is that 10,000 customers total over 12 years?

[QuantumG]

Or is that 10,000 customers that regularly renew their MySQL licenses?

What's the average license cost? $40,000?

Re:Is that 10,000 customers total over 12 years?

[timmarhy]

most real dba's have a lot more then a single server to look after. try about 10 or more. a dba's a heck of a lot cheaper.

Re:Is that 10,000 customers total over 12 years?

[ScentCone]

$4995 is still a heck of a lot less then a full time DBA

Um... how does paying for the license get around needing a DBA? It's not exactly an either-or.

Re:10,000 customers?

[suv4x4]

I'm a Postgres user and shrug my shoulders as to why anybody would use something with all the warts of MySQL

Don't you feel the burning irony of posting this on Slashdot, one of the more prominent MySQL users?

While you're busy with your tiny holy war, people take MySQL for what it offers and builds useful services and sites with it, among those Google, Yahoo, Digg, Apple...

Re:10,000 customers?

[darekana]

Why would anybody use something with all the warts of MySQL?

Probably for out-of-the-box replication...

Capital isn't the problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

PostgreSQL has done far more with far less capital.

Since you probably won't believe me, I invite you to compare the features of each. Visiting each project's web site is a good place to start. Once you see how much further ahead PostgreSQL is technologically than MySQL, consider how they managed to accomplish that with relatively little capital.

Re:10,000 customers?

[mcrbids]

If you're tossing Wankr 2.1 [parm.net] together in your bedroom then MySQL free, pgsql, or even sqlite is more than enough to meet your needs. If you run a large business that relies on MySQL to actually make some $$, then purchasing support is a rational choice. Especially since TCO is still about an order of magnitude less than competition.

I make money with my PostgreSQL database. My small-but-growing business will pass the $1,000,000 gross income mark this year, with over 30% profit margins. My issue here is that PostgreSQL has "just worked" with zero significant support issues in almost 7 years.

24 x 7 x 365.

Over 70 school districts use our product, and while there are the inevitable wrinkles, uptime is *never* a problem, and never has a single support thread been tracked back to a fault in the database.

So, no. That's not an issue. At least, as far as I can determine.

My experience with "paid support" is that people who are essentially hired monkeys and who do not understand what they're talking about do google searches for you while you wait. If that fails, they talk to their managers who then do more google searches.

Typically, it's 4 or 5 days before you get ahold of somebody who does anything but google searches, and he/she then needs to spend a few hours determining that there is a real issue to be addressed. And when that happens, they'll implement one of the solutions found in a google search first.

But a support e-mail list usually has meaningful answers within a few hours if your question is reasonably well written, and doesn't cost jack.

Which do YOU prefer?

Re:10,000 customers?

[jadavis]

Says here you get 24x7 web and phone support plus 30 minute emergency response time.

Sun Microsystems offers 24x7 PostgreSQL support.

Eat that, pgsql-bugs

I've always found the mailing lists to be great. I'm sorry you didn't have that experience. By the way, pgsql-bugs is not a typical support channel, you'd be better off in pgsql-general or #postgresql if you have support needs. Unless you have an actual bug, of course.

Ramen

[remmelt]

The problem with your reasoning is that stockholders are very bad at long term projection. If they can turn a profit in a short time they'll jump at the chance, no matter what long term fall-out may be. This is true because stockholders don't care about the business itself but about the profit it makes. See, a typical stockholder doesn't care how good RedHat's maintenance subscription service level really is. If they can cut the service in half and still retain a number of clients, they will. This will ultimately be bad for business and it's immediately bad for customers and customer relations, but it will up the profit, so it's done.

If you would buy stock in a somewhat anonymous company, would you go and investigate what their business practices are like? Do you care about their customer service? I appreciate that there are exceptions, but most likely you won't. Yes, there are people who invest in companies that they know and care about (sports clubs come to mind,) but the majority of investors invest for a profit. If a company can turn a profit sooner rather than later, they will go for it. Most investors won't care about the database, the open sourciness, the service, the customers or anything else, but they'll care about the numbers on the yearly report. There is linkage, but if it's not apparent, if it's not 1-1 related, there won't be much interest.

Our guiding principle is "Do the Right Thing." This means doing what is best for our staff members, customers, business partners, and communities for the long term, and believing that "right" answers exist. It also means measuring our success, not merely in financial terms, but by how consistently we act according to this principle.

(From here: http://www.mathworks.com/company/aboutus/mission_v alues/)
I think that is very well said, and I think it's something that doesn't go over well for public companies. MathWorks is still privately held.

Re:10,000 customers?

[TheRaven64]

yet in the real world it seems to be working just fine.

And let's pick a not-so-random name from that list; Wikipedia. Remember when they had some major hardware issues, which caused their database servers to crash. The admins announced proudly that almost half of their database servers had come back online without data corruption! They actually believed the fact that half of their MySQL installs had trashed their data due to not supporting ACID properly was a good thing just because not all of their machines had been in the middle of a sensitive operation at the time.

This is why people laugh at MySQL users. They honestly seem to believe that a product which doesn't even fulfil the basic requirements for a database is adequate for their needs. Try an experiment; get a real database and a MySQL server running, and keep firing transactions at them. Then pull the power cord out of the machine. Do this a few times. See which database has any data left at the end. A real database will lose the last transaction (there's no way it can't, unless you have redundant everything including power), but it won't lose the rest of the data.