Can Sun Make MySQL Pay? 273
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?"
Maybe it is not about Sun making money (Score:3, Interesting)
This is where you have to think outside of the box. There are some [webpronews.com] who believe that Sun may simply be the pawn of Oracle. Oracle could not buy MySQL directly because of anti-trust issues etc.. Not to mention, Sun and Oracle have been "strategic partners" for a very long time. However, another company could purchase MySQL to kill it off.
I am not saying this is exactly what happend, but I do think the above author and Dvorak [marketwatch.com] make some good points. Disclaimer: IANADF - I am not a Dvorak fan
Java (Score:5, Interesting)
Mindshare (Score:5, Interesting)
According to Torvald's biography, Linus walked out of a meeting in the 90's that Sun had called with the open-source community because the license they were introducing didn't pass his muster. It is interesting to see Sun coming around.
Of course, I could be totally wrong and we could be looking at a storm on the horizon.
Back Inside the Box (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a 7X increase, no small potatoes, but if Sun is thinking long term (esp., hopefully, w/r/t international markets), I don't think this is as unlikely as the article writer seems to.
Re:Why should this be a surprise? (Score:5, Interesting)
Customers don't pay for MySQL professional because it's not that great of a database. As a "free" option, there's tons of support for it. It was seen early on as "the" database for OSS work. As a result, nearly every OSS tool in existence is built around MySQL.
However, if we're talking about someone looking to pay for support, we're probably talking about a business of some sort. And for businesses, features like ANSI syntax, transactions, reliability, scalability, tools, familiarity to the DBAs, and a strong reputation for customer service are all factors that play into their decision. Why would they purchase MySQL when options like SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Informix, Pervasive, Teradata, and half a dozen other RDBMSes with stronger reputations in the market are available?
While MySQL has made great strides in their progress toward becoming a competitor in the Enterprise market, it's a bit of an uphill battle that they're going to have a hard time winning. The market sees MySQL as an OSS toy that children play with before they grow up and use a REAL database. Changing that perception is going to be hard.
Worse yet, it's a race against time before powerful new competitors like Apache Derby (formerly Cloudscape) start pushing MySQL out of the market.
That being said, I wish I invented an "OSS toy". A billion dollars as compensation sounds like a rather sweet deal.
Re:Why should this be a surprise? (Score:3, Interesting)
OS config in DB (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Maybe it is not about Sun making money (Score:3, Interesting)
See it? (No peaking at the next paragraph until you think about it for yourself for a second.)
Sun bought MySQL precisely because it is a thorn in Oracle's side. They won't want it to go away, they want it to continue being a thorn in Oracle's side.
Re:I didn't go to business school, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I concur. I have had experience with Sun's Platinum support, and they do good work. You call up, explain your problem to the first line support, and you get immediately put through to an engineer, who'll do the preliminary troubleshooting with you. If you already have done some troubleshooting, the engineer will listen patiently to your results, and if they're sufficient, he'll either provide a fix or send on-site support over.
No two-week hassle with first-line support who work from a script and are unwilling to escalate to an engineer until you start threatening to escalate to your account manager (like a large firewall vendor I currently work with), just an entire support structure that just assumes that you know what you are talking about, and yet are trained to ask the right questions to weed out the lusers who don't even know how to do basic troubleshooting. Bad disk in a RAID set? Just read the error messages from the log, run iostat -E and report the output, and voila, a new disk is on its way.
Sun support is wonderful. Lower levels than Platinum may take a little longer, but I doubt that the technical knowledge displayed is any less. Too bad I currently don't need the level of support and reliability Sun provides. If you don't, like me, then Sun kit is massively overpriced. If you do, it's right on the money.
Mart