Can Sun Make MySQL Pay?

AlexGr submitted a nice followup to last weeks billion dollar Sun buyout of MySQL. He notes that "Jeff Gould presents an interesting analysis in Interop News: How can an open source software company with $70 million or so in revenue and no profits to speak of be worth $1 billion? That's the question Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been trying to answer since he bought MySQL last week. Like most commercial open source companies, MySQL makes money by enticing well-heeled customers to pay for an enterprise version of its product that comes with more bells and whistles than the community version it gives away for free. It appears though that the additional features of the Enterprise version are not enough to compensate for the revenue-destroying effects of the free Community alternative. What else could explain the surprising fact that MySQL has quietly filled out its open source portfolio with a closed source proprietary management software tool known as Enterprise Software Monitor?"

Comments

Building a truly Enterprise competitor to Oracle

[redwoodtree]

I have to agree with other comments so far. MySQL has built its business on charging $3500 here and there for "Enterprise" support. They have also made a big push to sell their MySQL Cluster based on NDB. Unfortunately, NDB doesn't work for about 99% of the systems out there. That hasn't stopped them from selling it to customers that don't need it or can't use it.

In terms of their other high availability solutions, they are mostly hacks. Their multi-master replication option uses an auto-increment offset workaround to keep inserts from stomping on each other, but this isn't without its problems, also, recovery isn't easy. Their cluster solution uses DRBD and Heartbeat to compete with things like Veritas Cluster Server, it's okay but it's really not innovate, it's another patchwork of technologies. Finally, Without point-in-time recovery through the use of something like rollback logs, it's highly dubious to put anything requiring truly ACID type compliance on MySQL.

Sun needs to put resources into plugging all these holes. If they can fix the major shortcomings with NDB, and get cluster to work for more people, they may actually have a hugely successful "enterprise" offering.

Re:MySQL forgot the important part of the equation

[CmdrGravy]

Ha ! And be forced to use Microsoft Stupid Studio, I think not.