I tried to clarify the facts in another posting a moment ago: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=525246&cid=23098626
Here I will discuss the business model considerations, MySQL's commitment to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and why we made the decision we made.
First and foremost: we at MySQL firmly believe that open source is a superior way of producing software. You get better quality faster, and you often get better innovation too.
So it is not lightly that we have decided a few times to produce non-open software, such as the MySQL Monitor introduced some years ago. So why do we do that?
The reason is that we have an ambition not only to produce FOSS code, but also to be a profitable business that can exist for a long time. Each time we make more money, we hire more developers to develop GPL code.
If the world were perfect, we would only produce GPL code and we would have a great business that cna fund the software development. But we have found that the world is not perfect. We have been experimenting with a variety of business models around FOSS (dual licensing, support only, simple subscriptions, different binaries for community and enterprise, non-open source features) to find the best one. And we will continue to experiment until we are satisfied. We need to find a model that allows us to produce a ton of great code under GPL while having the financial strength to do all this.
To get to this goal of ours, we believe we have to be more pragmatic than dogmatic. Call it a necessary evil if you like. Having production add-ons that we provide only to paying customers currently seems to use to be a useful model. Our partners and customers think it is great. Many users think it is great. But not all do (as evident from this thread on/.). I would hope we could please all, but I am afraid we cannot.
In all of this - i.e. as we experiment with open source business models (as there aren't really any role models bigger than ourselves that we could learn from) - we remain fully committed to producing the core database server always under the GPL (or some other approved FOSS licence).
In this work, we feel we have been able to produce enormous benefits to the world in the form of GPL software. The MySQL server could not have evolved as much as it did (not that I am saying it has evolved perfectly) if we hadn't had a revenue stream to fund the hiring of developers and others. We have open sourced MySQL Cluster which was an advanced closed-source database engine at Ericsson. We open sourced the Falcon storage engine.
I can appreciate that many of you are upset with our decisions. It has happened before that the community has been upset with us. But I hope that you can see that
* we are trying to be fully open and transparent with our decision-making in these areas
* we have a full commitment to produce the core MySQL server under GPL
* we are actively listening to your input
We can probably not please all, but you should know that we are trying to serve our community. We are immensely thankful for all the support and contributions that we have received in our 13-year history. We are hoping that we are good stewards of the MySQL phenomenon, and we hope that you can come to terms with the fact that we find revenue generation a vital part of our mission.
We may not have come up with the perfect business model yet (and perhaps the decision that is here being debated was utterly stupid), but we are determined to continue to seek the perfect business model for open source software so that we can continue to exist and be strong, and so that other software entrepreneurs can learn from our successes and mistakes.
Finally, please note that this entire decision and reasoning is something we developed on our own at MySQL AB several months ago, before being acquired by Sun. Sun has not asked us to do this or that. Or in fact, Sun has asked us the opposite - i.e. whether we should not just opensource all the stuff relating to backup. I will have such a discussion with my colleagues at Sun in the coming months.
Thanks for listening, and please let me know if you have figured out a better business model for us!
Marten formerly CEO of MySQL AB, now SVP at Sun
P.S. Pardon any typos. I had little time to review.
Thank you for taking the time to explain the MySQL AB rationale. Perfectly sane to my eyes.
You have good eyes.
Marten, I would like to also thank you for your informative posts. Even though I use postgresql (I need the postgis extensions), I think that MySQL is on the right track with it's business model development.
Of course open source licenses allow for some code and features to be released from the open source license by paying off the developers who developed the code and having them sign a contract. In that way their open source developments pay off and they can finally earn an income for their hard work.
What the community doesn't seem to get is that this is basically creating two versions of the same product. One open sourced and one closed source. It is basically forking off a closed source version and paying off developers to release it so they are finally paid for their hard work and years dedicated to writing code. Just that the open source version now doesn't have the same code and features as the new closed source version has. But that wouldn't stop open source developers from writing new code to put features back in the open source version. As long as it doesn't use source code from the closed source fork of it. For example this was done to WINE to create Crossover Office, WINEX/Cediga, et all. Also Red Hat Enterprise is different from Red Hat Fedora. Just that one version went commercial and the other went open source.
As an open source developer you actually want this to happen, so that all of your hard work is paid off finally. You want a company to buy out your work and pay you for it eventually. That doesn't make you selfish and it doesn't make you greedy either. I mean you spend years supporting the open source community for free and writing a lot of code without even being paid for it. So they really can't say you haven't given anything to the open source community. While people jokingly call open source developers as communists or hippies, in reality they are capitalists at heart. In the end they want equal pay for equal work. Open source projects are a good way to market their skills and show off their coding abilities and ability to work in a team. Plus it gives back to the community in free software. But the time will come eventually when some company decides the project is good enough to license and use in a commercial project so they sell their rights to it for money. Most of the time that doesn't happen and it continues to be unsupported and open source developers have friends and family members wondering if they are insane, doing all of that hard work for free and it looks like they are throwing away money or flushing it down the toilet.
There will still be an open source version of MySQL, just that parts of it got spun off into a closed source commercial version. I did a lot of research into open source business plans myself in college. You try to earn money via charging for tech support or donations, failing that you try to get some company like Sun to buy your code and pay off your developers to release the code from open source. But some open source companies sell t-shirts and stuffed animals and other stuff. Any way you look at it, it is still capitalism and still a company trying to earn a profit. You still have stock holders who want a return on their investments. You still have employees that expect a paycheck. It may be free software, but people aren't really writing it for free, they expect a payoff sooner or later.
I'm going to have to disagree with you to a certain extent. As an open source developer, *I* don't want a company buying my code and close sourcing additional features. Certainly it is possible to make money this way, but it would not be my preferred method. Instead my preferred method would be to get people to *pay for* my development and still have it open sourced. In other words, don't write a loss leader and hope that somebody will pay you at the back end. Find customers who want solutions and are wi
The decision makes sense, but to the extent that MySQL depends on geek mindshare, it will suffer. MySQL's interests and those of the open source community may not be precisely the same, and the community has no assurances that whatever closeness there is between our interests and those of MySQL AB will remain.
MySQL depends on one thing, and one thing only - Hosting providers. If it weren't for the fact that it was pretty much universally provided by hosting providers it wouldn't have reached anywhere near the popularity it has today. The same goes for PHP. PostgreSQL has always had the geek mindshare.
Now kindly get off my lawn./I've been saying that Sun supports Open Source more than other companies for years. It's nice to finally see someone with some authority at Sun (even if only as of late) say so here on slashdot.
I advise my clients that MySQL is a reasonable option for their data warehouses on a weekly basis. Your decision does not make me question that advice. I can appreciate your stance, and generally enjoy using your product.
I fully support what you are trying to do here, I wish MySQL to prosper in the years ahead as well.
Another way to put this so people can better understand - it's somewhat how Apple works, basing a lot of stuff on open source projects they contribute to but then building more proprietary and advanced things on top that they sell.
So, when will the default global SQL-mode setting be STRICT_TRANS_TABLES, STRICT_ALL_TABLES, ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO, NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER, NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO, NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION, NO_ZERO_DATE, NO_ZERO_IN_DATE, ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY, PIPES_AS_CONCAT, ANSI_QUOTES ?
I really like MySQL's cluster/replication features but I'm having a hard time taking it seriously until the above is the default setting, combined with having the Falcon engine as the default one.
Sun just got major kudos in my book for not only responding to this Slashdot article, but responding in the comments. There's not much more evidence you can provide that they are listening than this...especially with the Slashdot crowd.
Now, can someone please fix this summary? FUD should only come from Microsoft articles, am I right?
The simple fact that you regularly post substancial information on hot MySQL topics here personally tells me that using MySQL as the prime choice for the persistance layer can't be bad. I personally hate SQL as an additional language and would like it removed from the generic application stack ASAP, but all things RDBMS being more or less equal in the DB world, I choose the most frictionless DB which is MySQL in my view. Being someone who runs a small business around OSS myself I fully understand your positio
First - I like the innovative approach MySQL is taking with dual-licensing/etc. I think that sustainable approaches to Open Source are something that are underexplored. The only downside to this is what I might call the Norton-factor from the days of DOS/Win95/etc:
Microsoft releases product lacking key critical features. Microsoft works with 3rd-party partners to overcome these lacks of features (undelete, defrag, disk repair, registry cleanup, etc). 3rd party becomes entrenched and Microsoft doesn't want
Hmm, It is good that you are actively listening. Perhaps a forum, on the web, for you to communicate with your supporting community, where you could outline your objectives and ask for experimental ideas and engage them in evaluating the results, yes, perhaps that would convince me you were listening actively.
Besides convincing me, albeit an onerous task, it might just bring out an idea that results in a win-win. With tongues wagging in a vacuum of information, what we have is a lose/lose.
First of all, to end your message with a tongue and cheek response of "let me know if you find a better business model", is the worse ending in hubris I have ever seen. Do you honestly expect open source community members to accept that ludicrous excuse? The community did not put the company up for sale and now that you did, your looking for US to fix this major gaffe on your part?
Secondly, this move is fundamentally against what built MySQL in the first place. It is with a total disregard for the vali
Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.
-- Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, c. 1895
MySQL & FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
I tried to clarify the facts in another posting a moment ago: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=525246&cid=23098626
Here I will discuss the business model considerations, MySQL's commitment to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and why we made the decision we made.
First and foremost: we at MySQL firmly believe that open source is a superior way of producing software. You get better quality faster, and you often get better innovation too.
So it is not lightly that we have decided a few times to produce non-open software, such as the MySQL Monitor introduced some years ago. So why do we do that?
The reason is that we have an ambition not only to produce FOSS code, but also to be a profitable business that can exist for a long time. Each time we make more money, we hire more developers to develop GPL code.
If the world were perfect, we would only produce GPL code and we would have a great business that cna fund the software development. But we have found that the world is not perfect. We have been experimenting with a variety of business models around FOSS (dual licensing, support only, simple subscriptions, different binaries for community and enterprise, non-open source features) to find the best one. And we will continue to experiment until we are satisfied. We need to find a model that allows us to produce a ton of great code under GPL while having the financial strength to do all this.
To get to this goal of ours, we believe we have to be more pragmatic than dogmatic. Call it a necessary evil if you like. Having production add-ons that we provide only to paying customers currently seems to use to be a useful model. Our partners and customers think it is great. Many users think it is great. But not all do (as evident from this thread on
In all of this - i.e. as we experiment with open source business models (as there aren't really any role models bigger than ourselves that we could learn from) - we remain fully committed to producing the core database server always under the GPL (or some other approved FOSS licence).
In this work, we feel we have been able to produce enormous benefits to the world in the form of GPL software. The MySQL server could not have evolved as much as it did (not that I am saying it has evolved perfectly) if we hadn't had a revenue stream to fund the hiring of developers and others. We have open sourced MySQL Cluster which was an advanced closed-source database engine at Ericsson. We open sourced the Falcon storage engine.
I can appreciate that many of you are upset with our decisions. It has happened before that the community has been upset with us. But I hope that you can see that
* we are trying to be fully open and transparent with our decision-making in these areas
* we have a full commitment to produce the core MySQL server under GPL
* we are actively listening to your input
We can probably not please all, but you should know that we are trying to serve our community. We are immensely thankful for all the support and contributions that we have received in our 13-year history. We are hoping that we are good stewards of the MySQL phenomenon, and we hope that you can come to terms with the fact that we find revenue generation a vital part of our mission.
We may not have come up with the perfect business model yet (and perhaps the decision that is here being debated was utterly stupid), but we are determined to continue to seek the perfect business model for open source software so that we can continue to exist and be strong, and so that other software entrepreneurs can learn from our successes and mistakes.
Finally, please note that this entire decision and reasoning is something we developed on our own at MySQL AB several months ago, before being acquired by Sun. Sun has not asked us to do this or that. Or in fact, Sun has asked us the opposite - i.e. whether we should not just opensource all the stuff relating to backup. I will have such a discussion with my colleagues at Sun in the coming months.
Thanks for listening, and please let me know if you have figured out a better business model for us!
Marten
formerly CEO of MySQL AB, now SVP at Sun
P.S. Pardon any typos. I had little time to review.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Marten, I would like to also thank you for your informative posts. Even though I use postgresql (I need the postgis extensions), I think that MySQL is on the right track with it's business model development.
Re: (Score:1)
dual licensing? - fine!
some code closed for payers? - not fine!
why? coz we, the average IT guy got the impression that we will not be seeing some new cool code as you will be closing it.
don't turn your back to the people who made you so popular so that you can get $1b paycheck from Sun.
comeon guys..
regards from my basement..
Re:MySQL & FOSS (Score:5, Interesting)
What the community doesn't seem to get is that this is basically creating two versions of the same product. One open sourced and one closed source. It is basically forking off a closed source version and paying off developers to release it so they are finally paid for their hard work and years dedicated to writing code. Just that the open source version now doesn't have the same code and features as the new closed source version has. But that wouldn't stop open source developers from writing new code to put features back in the open source version. As long as it doesn't use source code from the closed source fork of it. For example this was done to WINE to create Crossover Office, WINEX/Cediga, et all. Also Red Hat Enterprise is different from Red Hat Fedora. Just that one version went commercial and the other went open source.
As an open source developer you actually want this to happen, so that all of your hard work is paid off finally. You want a company to buy out your work and pay you for it eventually. That doesn't make you selfish and it doesn't make you greedy either. I mean you spend years supporting the open source community for free and writing a lot of code without even being paid for it. So they really can't say you haven't given anything to the open source community. While people jokingly call open source developers as communists or hippies, in reality they are capitalists at heart. In the end they want equal pay for equal work. Open source projects are a good way to market their skills and show off their coding abilities and ability to work in a team. Plus it gives back to the community in free software. But the time will come eventually when some company decides the project is good enough to license and use in a commercial project so they sell their rights to it for money. Most of the time that doesn't happen and it continues to be unsupported and open source developers have friends and family members wondering if they are insane, doing all of that hard work for free and it looks like they are throwing away money or flushing it down the toilet.
There will still be an open source version of MySQL, just that parts of it got spun off into a closed source commercial version. I did a lot of research into open source business plans myself in college. You try to earn money via charging for tech support or donations, failing that you try to get some company like Sun to buy your code and pay off your developers to release the code from open source. But some open source companies sell t-shirts and stuffed animals and other stuff. Any way you look at it, it is still capitalism and still a company trying to earn a profit. You still have stock holders who want a return on their investments. You still have employees that expect a paycheck. It may be free software, but people aren't really writing it for free, they expect a payoff sooner or later.
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Instead my preferred method would be to get people to *pay for* my development and still have it open sourced. In other words, don't write a loss leader and hope that somebody will pay you at the back end. Find customers who want solutions and are wi
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If it weren't for the fact that it was pretty much universally provided by hosting providers it wouldn't have reached anywhere near the popularity it has today. The same goes for PHP.
PostgreSQL has always had the geek mindshare.
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Thanks very much for taking the time to respond. I appreciate your taking the time to do so.
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I advise my clients that MySQL is a reasonable option for their data warehouses on a weekly basis. Your decision does not make me question that advice. I can appreciate your stance, and generally enjoy using your product.
Apple takes a similar approach (Score:2)
Another way to put this so people can better understand - it's somewhat how Apple works, basing a lot of stuff on open source projects they contribute to but then building more proprietary and advanced things on top that they sell.
Re: (Score:2)
I really like MySQL's cluster/replication features but I'm having a hard time taking it seriously until the above is the default setting, combined with having the Falcon engine as the default one.
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Marten Mickos posts true insights regularly on /. (Score:2)
I personally hate SQL as an additional language and would like it removed from the generic application stack ASAP, but all things RDBMS being more or less equal in the DB world, I choose the most frictionless DB which is MySQL in my view.
Being someone who runs a small business around OSS myself I fully understand your positio
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Marten
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The only downside to this is what I might call the Norton-factor from the days of DOS/Win95/etc:
Microsoft releases product lacking key critical features. Microsoft works with 3rd-party partners to overcome these lacks of features (undelete, defrag, disk repair, registry cleanup, etc). 3rd party becomes entrenched and Microsoft doesn't want
Re: (Score:2)
Marten
Re: (Score:1)
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Do you honestly expect open source community members to accept that ludicrous excuse? The community did not put the company up for sale and now that you did, your looking for US to fix this major gaffe on your part?
Secondly, this move is fundamentally against what built MySQL in the first place. It is with a total disregard for the vali