Ask MySQL's CEO About Running a Free Software Business

There have been so many articles written about the perils, pitfalls, and possible rewards of running a business based on free or open source software that we can't possibly link to them all. Instead, let's ask MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos how to make money with a company based on free software, because he runs a company that is almost always touted as one of the world's greatest free software (business) successes. You may want to read some of these interviews with Mårten before you come up with your own questions in order to avoid duplication, but other than that suggestion and the usual Slashdot interview rules, ask whatever you like, however you like.

Biggest Problem?

In your eyes, what's the biggest problem with MySQL? More specifically, what leaves market share room for Oracle & your competitors? Do you even see yourself as having any competitors since your product is free?

Re:Biggest Problem?

They still have competitors like PostgreSQL that are also free. MySQL currently has a huge following, and is "the" database offered by most shared hosting companies. What is MySQL doing to ensure that they stay in that position. As far as I've heard, PostgreSQL is a much better database, the only reason why MySQL is the DB used by webhosts is because many tools (phpBB and others) depend on MySQL to function properly.

Perception of low quality for 'free'

How do you fight the perception that MySQL is not suitable for 'the real world' because it is free?

Strategies...

What are some of the "business strategies" you use to make money off of a freely available open-source product? How do they differ/compare with tradional strategies of selling a non-opensource or freely available product?

R&D Directions?

In a market where people are just looking for stability, simplicity & scalability, where do you turn for innovation in your products? Is there a lot of research and development towards new features and completely new products in MySQL's community or do you aim primarily to do one thing well? How do you influence the direction of this research in such a large open source project? Do you attempt to add direction at all?

Defects per KLOC

Your website [mysql.com] touts you as having the lowest defects per KLOC by up to 12 times the industry standard, what do you attribute as the leading factor to your success in this respect? Since cold cash is the traditional method, how do you incentivise code quality in an open source product?

Achievements & Fallout

In your five years as MySQL CEO, what has been your proudest moment? Do you find it difficult to lead a company based on a product that belongs to a community? Do you ever experience any fallout/backfire from running your company on such a business model?

Roadmap Decisions

When you plan your software product roadmaps, what feature requests do you pay more attention to? Enterprise customers want scalability, reliability, redundancy, and security; but some database programmers are looking for features such as solid transaction support, stored procedures, and more functions. How do you rank which feature requests get attention first?

IPO

When will you bring the company public?

Conflict of Interest

One of the most common complaints I've heard about the business model of profiting on support for a product, is that it provides motivation to keep the product from becoming very user friendly. After all, if the product is too easy to use, who will pay for support? In my own experience, I've seen a lot of companies that consider support to be insurance, and don't use it for help with installation, configuration, or to overcome usability issues so much as a way to cover their asses in case something goes very wrong. Do a lot of your customers use support to overcome usability problems and if so, does this de-motivate you to solve other usability issues?

how hard is it?

To convince a large company to shell out a large amount of dollars to support something that's free? Especially considering all the new enterprise-friendly features that are being added in 5.0 and 5.1 like NDB. Do you have any advice to offer or arguments that work better than others? Do larger companies quibble about the fact that it's free, or do they try for a break in the price? Or are you more into licensing those mysql users, selling them value-added once they are already using the product and all the features, just adding support, expert advice and "certified binaries"?

Help in avoiding duplication of questions

To avoid asking something that's already been answered, here's a synopsis of some of his more recent interviews.

In Guy Kawasaki's Blog, [guykawasaki.com] he's asked:
1. How do you make money with an Open Source product?
2. What changes in the Open Source community's attitude have you encountered since you decided "to build a company" around MySQL?
3. Do you compete head to head with Oracle or do you have different customers?
4. What's the biggest MySQL DB?
5. What's the weirdest use of MySQL?
6. What's the most "mission critical" use of MySQL?
7. How does a company controls what's happening to its product when the Open Source community is doing the programming and testing?
8. Is Open Source hindering innovation because it's one thing to debug an existing product but it's another to design a new one?
9. Who fixes the most bugs?
10. If MySQL ceased to exist as an organization, would MySQL the product continue?

In InfoWorld, [infoworld.com] he's asked:
1. Recently, a number of open-source developers have expressed their unhappiness with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the second draft of GPLv3. Are you concerned about a potential forking of the license as some people stick with GPLv2 and others move to GPLv3?
2. How do you decide when MySQL needs to develop new features for the database and when to rely on the open-source community for those innovations?
3. So, is open source then a more forgiving environment than the proprietary software world?
4. What's ahead in 2007 for MySQL?
5. What's the latest news on Falcon, the transactional database engine being developed by database architect Jim Starkey who joined MySQL in February?
6. Is MySQL's current dominance of the open-source database market ever a cause for concern?

In Forbes, [forbes.com] he's asked:
1. How is open source software influencing what the bigger tech giants like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft will do in the next year?
2. Do open source firms that sell to large, proprietary software companies risk being dubbed sellouts by the community that's helped them develop their software?
3. How do Oracle's recent open source acquisitions affect MySQL?
4. Is Oracle more of a threat now?
5. What is MySQL's workforce like?
6. MySQL recently took funding from Red Hat, Intel and SAP. What's the strategy here?
7. Is there an IPO for MySQL in the future?

In LXer, [lxer.com] he's asked:
1. What are your short and long term goals do you have for the MySQL database system?
2. Realistically where do you think you will pick up quick conversions to enhance your immediate market share from your competitors? Later, how much market share must MySQL commercial versions have to pick up to have long-term viability?
3. If you see your main opportunity is in the replacement of Oracle installations does MySQL match or exceed the forte of Oracle in the transaction per second processing? Are you now aimed at the lower end of the Oracle market installations? What will it take to be really competitive with Oracle at the upper end of the scale?
4. If you see your natural market as the range SQL Server is now aimed at, small medium business and departmental installations, can you match their ease of administration? If not what is the salient argument for such companies to install MySQL over the competition? Since you are primarily aimed at the market willing to pay for your enhancements and support, do you see any advantage in offering a MySQL product that will undercut MySQL server from below?
5. What trade offs have had to be made to make MySQL 5.0 commercial version more feature rich and robust?
6. Where do you see competition arising from for pursuing the paths to th

GPL protocal

Why is MySQL's justification of claiming the GPL applies to the MySQL wire level protocol itself?

The few, the proud...

Your company is one of the few that has made open source into a legitimate business model. What has made you succeed where others have failed?

MySQL trade coverage

Let me start by stating that I use MySQL for numerous intensive "enterprise" applications, so I don't intend this question to sound as critical as it probably does, but . . .

Does MySQL AG pay for the intensive promotion it receives in Linux Journal similar publications ? By this I mean the fact that every single article about anything that uses a database mentions MySQL, when you would expect an occasional sqlite or PostgreSQL, even disregarding technical advantages MySQL might have.

It might be that the publications lean towards MySQL without your direct influence, because you advertise with them or simply due to the preferences of editors and authors, of course. But if it is a conscious and organized bias I would like to know.

Again, this question is asked out of curiosity and not meant to be critical -- I work as an independent contractor, and I will spend the next several weeks helping a customer upgrade dozens of mysql servers to version 5, and migrate data -- I like MySQL, and it makes it possible for me to make money while playing with computers !

What's missing

What other killer open source app would compliment MySQL and kill the pay for competition?

Bank manager

You give MySQL away for free, and sell an enhanced version also. How do you convince the bank manager/other investors to give you money to start a for-profit business, based on such a model?

profit!

make new product
give it away fro free
????
profit!

open source?

are you really open source? its lovely that one can look at the source,
and that its gpld, but in order to get to the mainline, one must agree
to a 'contributors license' which assign all rights to mysql ad.
a bit of a dodge?

MySQL business model for niche products?

Hello Mårten,

First, congratulations on MySQL's market capitalization! My question is:

I have been working part time for about 6 years on software for text/data mining and general semantic information extraction. Almost all of my development is in Common Lisp, but I have ported little bits to Java and released that under the GPL in the past. I view this as a small, niche market, not like MySQL. What do you think that chances are for making money on GPLing a niche product?

MySQL is very widely used so if you capture commercial use icensing costs for a small percent of users, you do very well. For my software, with luck perhaps a few hundred companies a year might start adopting my product. Does it seem like wishful thinking for me to use a GPL based business model like MySQL's?

I want my customers to have my source code for a lot of reasons, but I would also like to capture revenue. I might just end up going to market as a proprietary product that incidently includes source code, with licensing that prohibits redistribution to non-customers.

Thanks for your help,
Mark

What is income per user?

A successful open source business model, which MySQL seem to enjoy, is to make many users (as mentioned in reply to the first question in Guy Kawasaki's blog [guykawasaki.com]) of whom only a small number pay for extra features, service etc.

What proportion of active MySQL users pay for service, and what is the average income per user?

Commercial vs free - where to draw the line

I work for a good sized business and looked at using the Cluster Jumpstart but when I said told my boss the cost and that we'd have to play for flights he laughed at me, even though we're starting to really use mySQL pretty seriously now for some stuff.

With costs for things like this and gold/platinum support also relatively high on a per server basis it seems there's a wide gap between community based support which costs nothing and enterprise support which appears somewhat pricey.

How do you draw the line for paid vs free support particularly since a lot of SME's are using mySQL and may be unable to afford it? Was it a conscious decision to pitch it high to display value in the product?

the next big thing

When will the world get to the next big paradigm in database technology. As in, past the relational model.

Scale Oracle vs. MySQL

I was going to build a very large database and don't need to many features. MySQL seems fine in that respect. I was wondering if the cluster version of MySQL scales as good as Oracle. I know your answers should be biased, but MySQL seems to target the middle market. Should I go with a different product for a very large database?

Re:open source nightmares

Sounds like you're complaining about phpBB not MySQL, not to mention the standard troll of "its insecure because anybody can read the source".

There's plenty of companies out there that offer support for MySQL. Sure you got to pay for it, but if you used a closed system, you'd be paying for it even if you didn't need it.

Re:MySQL Front

This doesn't fully explain the situation (as noted by the linked article), but it does at least provide a bit more info:

http://chisflorinel.blogspot.com/2006/09/mysql-fro nt-discontinued.html [blogspot.com]

Re:open source nightmares

it's horribly insecure since everyone can see the source code

LOL someone on slashdot believes in the "security through obscurity" paradigm.