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

Mod article -1, Troll

[morgan_greywolf]

MySQL doesn't make money by enticing the customers with the 'extra bells and whistles' of MySQL Enterprise. They make money because companies who base any important part of their IT infrastructure on MySQL or any open source product will want to pay for support. It's the same reason companies pay for RedHat or SuSE. Who has better support for an open source product than the developer of that product?

Re:Why should this be a surprise?

[martenmickos]

Thank you for your comments! At MySQL AB we try to listen carefully to our users and customers and make sure our product fits their needs. From our frugal beginnings in the late 90s we have scaled with our customers and today, as you know, MySQL powers Facebook, Second Life, YouTube, Google and others.

These power users always test and find the limits of MySQL. Many times it seems that something is wrong with our product and that we still have a long ways to go. But then we take the bug reports, feature requests and other input and sit down and design it into our next release, and soon enough we have reached a new level of scalability and maturity. Sure, many times we wish we could deliver the new goodies sooner. But constructing a DBMS is hard work, and each change in the software introduces the risk of side effects in the form of new bugs. So we try to be methodical when making changes.

The comments in your posting here have already been distributed to the entire MySQL company so that we can evaluate them and take action where needed. Although it can feel embarrassing both to give and to take negative comments, at the end of the day that is one of the key reasons why open source is a superior software development paradigm. So please keep the comments coming! Behind your disappointment, we can hear that you are passionate about this. And if you like, feel free to tell us who you are so that we can engage directly with you in resolving those issues.

Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB

P.S. As you may have read elsewhere, we are super excited about the opportunity to be part of Sun. In recent years Sun has become the strongest proponent of free and open source software, and they have a new strategy that includes working closely with *all* platforms, especially Linux and Windows. So with that framework, and knowing that Sun has very deep database expertise that can accelerate the MySQL product roadmap, we felt this was the right thing to do. And nothing wrong in getting access to a huge global field organisation that can sell and support MySQL to customers large and small!