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MySQL Hits $50 Million Revenue, Plans IPO
An anonymous coward writes "MySQL, purveyor of the open-source database of the same name, is on the road to becoming a publicly traded company, bolstered by $50 million in revenue in 2006. "It's still in the pipeline," Chief Executive Marten Mickos said of the plan to hold an initial public offering of his company's stock. He declined to discuss when the company planned to go public, but said, "We're making good progress, doing all the things we need to get done.""
They're the happy medium. They give away their product for free, but if you want the extras (support) you gotta pay. I'm happy with that, as I'm sure most people are.
Programmers gotta pay the rent you know..
MABASPLOOM!
I wonder if Google is planning to leverage MySQL in a proxy warfare type scenario vs. M$.
The contention between the two giants has been heating up, and MySQL is steadily gaining ground on SQL Server for marketshare.
Couple that with Google's recent contributions to the MySQL project and statements by one of thier engineer's (Callahan?) that they would continue to enhance the DB & pump the code back into the community... focusing on stability, recovery, and fine tuning code.
Looks like Google could be contending with M$ on at least three fronts soon counting search, office, & now DB's through MySQL.
I want to see them rumble. The timing of this IPO is very interesting.
Regards.
Hell, even if they sell the software I'm happy if they give me the source. Open source != free.
This is not a dig at the folks at Mysql.
It is a warning to everyone who thinks that mysql will be immediately better for going public.
In my finance class I learned that the best way to grow a company is on revenues. Second best is private equity. Near the bottom of the list is public equity.
It's probably the case that Mysql's early investors are looking for their pay day. That's fine, but I'm more concerned about the long term effect of being a public company on the quality of mysql product.
The clever slashdotter with a little cash to gamble with should buy some mysql hold it for a year and dump it. They should come out ahead and be getting out while the picture looks rosy.
Food for thought.
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Maybe if they were a public company with some cash they would have been be the ones to buy InnoDB, instead of Oracle.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
That's the beauty of free software. If MySQL goes bad the codebase will be forked and another project will rise to take its place. It will be interesting to see what the MySQL prospectus will have to say to investors about this risk.
Good luck to MySQL. I hope they make a go of it, get rich, and don't shoot themselves in the foot by causing a code fork.
'If all there was was OSS,'
No. If nobody was being paid to code or profiting from open source software that would be true. Selling closed source software is not the only way to profit from software. IBM hosts OSS, codes OSS, and makes a boatload of cash on OSS. The same is true of many companies. Most programmers work on in-house applications, the idea that companies like Microsoft are where programmers get their bread is a myth.
More open source software means more companies have a greater potential to make money since they have the source code to make applications run in a way that is tailored to them. That opportunity existing means that more companies would take advantage of it and that my friend means more jobs for programmers.
Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. I never hear anything but condemnation and the most vitriolic forms of abuse around here for anyone who would *dare* to even dream of the idea of trying to make money from software development, (including an earlier post on this very article) and yet one of the first questions I see here is whether with MySQL's IPO, the FSF are getting a cut of the cheese.
Let me get this straight. It is by no means, in any way, EVER acceptable in your minds if anyone makes money from developing software, but just in case anybody does, they must immediately hand it over to Stallman?!?
The rank hypocrisy exhibited by you people at times literally leaves me gasping. It is beyond description.