Sun and MySQL: A Long-Timer's Take

by Reuven Lerner - Mar. 04, 2008Comments (2)

About six weeks ago, Sun Microsystems dropped a bombshell on the open-source community: MySQL AB, the company that develops and supports the popular open-source MySQL database, had agreed to be acquired for $1 billion. Last week, Sun and MySQL announced that the deal was complete.

MySQL has been one of the most popular open-source products for many years. It is arguably not the most powerful open-source database, or the fastest, particularly under a heavy lead. And many experienced database administrators turn their noses up at MySQL for a variety of reasons, from its lack of adherence to SQL standards, to odd behavior when working with dates.

But despite the criticism, MySQL has been a massive success. It runs on a very wide variety of operating systems. There are MySQL client interfaces for virtually every programming language. The community is large and supportive. There is ample documentation, both online and in book form. And it is ubiquitous; if you rent space from a hosting provider, it almost certainly uses MySQL.

That's all well and good. But at the end of the day, MySQL is still an open-source product, which you can download and use for free. Why would Sun pay $1 billion for something that it could download?

The answer is that MySQL produces two versions of their flagship database product. The better-known version is free of charge, distributed under the GNU Public License, and comes without any support. The commercial version, from which MySQL has apparently been making about $200 million per year, comes with support, and with a license that is similar to any commerical software product you might buy.

Sun once made its money from a combination of proprietary hardware and software. Changes in the computer industry have made that an increasingly problematic business model; while there are companies willing to pay top dollar for high-end hardware, Google and other companies have demonstrated that cheap Intel boxes running Linux can be quite effective.

Sun thus seems to be positioning itself as a one-stop shop for low-cost, powerful solutions. MySQL fits into that model quite well, allowing Sun to offer a combination of hardware, operating system, and database to it customers, for a fraction of what Oracle or IBM will offer. It has also been putting money into other high-profile open-source projects, such as JRuby, which it hopes will help to keep Java at the center of many enterprise software efforts.

The clear winners, at least in the short term, are the founders and employees of MySQL. Not ony do they get a fair amount of money, but they get the added exposure, marketing, and bundling that Sun can provide. In the medium to long term, however, the acquisiion means that MySQL's fortunes (as a company, not an open-source project) are hitched to Sun. Which means that if Sun continues to struggle in the market, MySQL may find itself at the mercy over forces and products it cannot control.

I believe that Sun has also gained from this acquisition, at least in the short term. Sun has gained a competitive advantage, and will now be able to enter many organizations that were previously unintersted in hearing about Sun products and services. If you're already a customer of MySQL service, then you might now be willin to consider other Sun services. We will have to see.

The acquisition also raises the profile of open-source products in general, and demonstrates that the dual-license strategy might be the best way to turn a free product into a successful business. Such a strategy is particularly useful under the GNU Public License; were MySQL released under a Berkeley license, as is the case with PostgreSQL, there would be little or no use for a dual license.

And indeed, I think that the biggest potential losers from the Sun acquisition are the people (like me, I should add) who have used other open-source databases, such as PostgreSQL. Josh Berkus, a core PostgreSQL contributor who has worked for Sun over the last few years, does not seem worried, writing that "it is Sun's goal to be the #1 data center vendor," and that it thus has an interest in promoting all databases, including a variety of open-source databases. I hope that he is right -- but I find it easier to believe that Sun will support and promote both JRuby and Jython, than that it'll help both MySQL and PostreSQL in the long term.


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Shailesh Patel uses OStatic to support Open Source, ask and answer questions and stay informed. What about you?



2 Comments
 

Yeah, sun's play here is definitely very interesting. They are active in the Open Source community, but have been laggards in the spirit for quite a while, only recently open sourcing java and solaris. Let's see how well they integrate and offer mysql, and what other solutions they can offer around it.


What Java was to the late '90s boom, LAMP seems to be for the current growth. SAMJ (pardon the bastardization!) was really not going anywhere, so Sun decides to corner at least PART of that stack.


Let's see how oracle reacts with their recent acquisitions.


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I agree that the MySQL story is one that has followed the classic path of many successful OSS products, where a commercial version and a free version walked in parallel until the commercial version had enough economic power to shake the whole product proposition up. This goes on in the freeware world, too. My beloved suite of Microsoft Office productivity app clones--better in my eyes than Open Office or other equivalents--from Software 602, and historically free, now cost money. Phooey.


Sam


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