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After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”,this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members,customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means.Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction uponhearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, includingexcitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.
Being part of the group planning this announcement for the last fewweeks, I have had the fortune to contemplate the consequences duringseveral partially sleepless nights (I usually sleep like a log). Andover the coming days and weeks, I’ll provide a series of blogs withvarious viewpoints of the deal.
First of all, let’s point out a couple of facts about SunMicrosystems — since all MySQL stakeholders may not be fully up tospeed about Sun.
Facts on Sun Microsystems
Founded 1982 by Andreas von Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy
34.200 employees worldwide, 13.9 billion dollars (9.4 billioneuros) in revenues FY 2007, market cap (total value of all Sun shares)about the same as yearly revenues
Grew astronomically with the Web, suffered from the Web bubble, now profitable over the last four quarters
Lead by Scott McNealy until 2006, now by Jonathan Schwartz (a prolific blogger)
The world’s biggest contributor to Open Source: Open Office, Java (now under GPL), GlassFish, NetBeans — and soon MySQL
Environmentally friendly; large numbers of distributed employees working at least partially from home
Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, just south of Cupertino (MySQL’s North American headquarters)
For me personally, I’m excited to get the opportunity to activelycontribute to the successful integration of MySQL into Sun. I want tomake an impact in merging our corporate cultures, and I look forward tomaking that a bi-directional process. Since I am based outside the US,I am particularly excited about meeting the many Sun engineers locatedin Hamburg (Germany), Grenoble (France), Prague (Czech Republic), StPetersburg (Russia), Beijing (China) and Bangalore (India).
But let me now turn to the more general planned implications of Sun’s acquisition of MySQL AB.
What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for MySQL users?
Given Sun’s proven track record as the largest contributor to OpenSource, I think MySQL users have plenty of reason to feel happy aboutthe acquisition. There are many companies that attempt to ride the waveof positive attention towards Open Source, but in my judgement, Sungets it right. Sun gets Open Source. Java has been released under theGPL. There’s the OpenSolaris operating system. There’s Open Office /Star Office. There’s the GlassFish application server. There’s theNetBeans IDE tool. And more.
Sun’s track record is embodied by individuals with a solid set ofFOSS values, such as Simon Phipps (Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer),Ian Murdock (Debian founder, now Sun’s Chief OS Strategist), and JoshBerkus (PostgreSQL lead). I’ve met all three in various FOSS arenas, Irespect their work, and I am looking forward to be working closely withthem.
Anxiety on the part of MySQL users may stem from Sun’s success withJava and Solaris. Will MySQL’s support for other programming languagesand operating systems now be given less attention?
Absolutely not. MySQL is still being managed by the same people, andthe charter is still the same. There is no need for reducing the set ofplatforms or languages. It only makes sense for us to continue tosupport defacto Web development standards like LAMP, as well asemerging ones like Ruby and Eclipse. This deal is about addition, not subtraction. But let’s dwell on the topic of Solaris a bit. Solaris has a specialposition in the heart of MySQL, as it was the first platform underwhich MySQL was developed. Linux came second. Internally, code coveragetests were long performed just on Sun. And with the DTrace probesplanned as part of 6.0, some types of optimisation of MySQLapplications are the easiest on Solaris.
I would expect that having access to the topmost Solaris and Javaexperts within the same company will accelerate our development for thebenefit of MySQL users on the Solaris platform, and in the Javaenvironment, respectively.
But I don’t expect that in any way to be at thecost of other popular operating systems (Linux, Windows, Mac OS/X,other Unixes etc.) or development environments (PHP, Ruby on Rails,Perl, Python, ODBC, C++, C#, VB etc.). MySQL grew with LAMP and MySQL without LAMP at its core is simply unimaginable.It was MySQLs part of LAMP that interested Sun in the first place.Hence I don’t see Sun having a platform migration strategy, but tocontinue to be an integral part of the dot in .com.
So while the news may be especially good for MySQL users on Solarisand/or Java, the news is definitely good irrespective of environment:As part of Sun, the MySQL database will have immediate access totechnical, marketing, OSS developer relations and sales rescources thatwould have taken us years to build as an independent company.
What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for the core MySQL community?
I’d like to think that the acquisition of MySQL by Sun will be seenas good news also by the core group of users who form the active MySQLcommunity. This is because Sun is a safe haven for MySQL. Sun knows Open Source, and to the extent things change, I expect Sun to addvalue to our community. I don’t expect huge change, though. We continueto work with our quality contributors, we continue to provide our MySQLForums, the Planet MySQL blog aggregator, we remain on the #mysql-devand #mysql channels on Freenode, we provide MySQL University lessons,we meet at the MySQL Users Conference. We’ll put effort into connectingthe many FOSS enthusiasts and experts at Sun — whom we will now learnto know better — with our active user community.
What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for the MySQL employees?
Admittedly, this blog is not directed at MySQL employees. We have adifferent, internal blog called “Village MySQL” for that purpose (asopposed to “Planet MySQL”). But many of our users, community members,customers, and partners have close relationships with MySQL employees —and you may be interested in what Sun’s acquisition of MySQL means forthe employees.
For employees, Sun’s acquisition means continuity. Mårten Mickoswill continue to lead us, and our executives and key engineering leadsplan to join Sun. In addition, our existing engineering staff will beinvited to come over as well. Sun executives have made us feel verywelcomed and valued.
Very important for our employees is the fact that we can continue towork on Free and Open Source software. We can continue to work fromhome (as most of us do, including myself). Titles, reportingstructures, and long-term goals may change, but as acquisition goes,the Sun culture as I’ve experienced it so far seems fairly similar toours.
And — whether it’s destiny, divinity or just good luck — we get the opportunity to digest all of this together, during the MySQL All-Company Meeting here in Orlando. It goes on this week until Saturday 19 Jan.
Being acquired by Sun is unique for all of us MySQLers. But for twovery special employees, it’s something even more. I’m thinking of our founders, Michael “Monty” Widenius and David Axmark.I’m very happy for them. Sure, the transaction has a financial impacton them, and it’s positive. But we’re humble Scandinavians, so we don’tflash money, nor even talk about it. More importantly, I can see their heritage being in good hands at Sun.They didn’t develop MySQL in order to Get Rich Quick; in fact, theyrejected offers that would have accomplished that goal during theBubble. They developed MySQL in order to have a positive impact on theworld of computing. And as a step in that direction, they took inventure financing.
VCs are more motivated by money than our founders,and obviously look for a return on their investment. That involveseither an IPO or a trade sale. Of all candidates to acquire MySQL, I cannot imagine a more ideal buyer from a founder perspective than Sun Microsystems.If I know our founders right (and I’ve known Monty since the late 1970sand David since the 1980s), they will use this deal as an opportunityto accomplish even more within the space of Open Source and SunMicrosystems.
Congratulations, Monty and David! And congratulations, MySQL users, community members, customers, partners and employees!
There's been a lot of positive coverage ofSun's acquisition of MySQL last week (with one or two odd-ballconspiracy stories). To me the most significant element is that Sun haslong recognized the disruptive nature of open source and is nowleveraging that power as part of their overall strategy.
Obviously, that's not new news. Sun has been doing this for severalyears with OpenSolaris, GlassFish, NetBeans, open sourcing Java, etc.The fact that both companies have bet on open source is key to theongoing success of MySQL. I don't think MySQL would have ever sold to acompany that was not "open-source compatible". What would be the point?
In some ways Gartner's analysisof the acquisition is among the most insightful. It's a strong vote ofconfidence since it speaks not just to the open source community but tomainstream IT:
Quote:
The MySQL purchase immediately casts Sun in the role of amajor open-source database management system vendor with heterogeneousoperating system solutions....
MySQL's largest user base resides on Linux, with the next largest user base residing on Windows. This will enable Sun to:
- Attract more Linux and Windows users as Sun customers
- Position itself more heterogeneously and shift its focus fromprimarily supporting Solaris-based (SAMP) systems to offering moreinclusive support for Linux-based (LAMP) systems
- Demonstrate its willingness to support a stack on other operating systems in addition to Solaris
- Exploit more market and revenue-generating opportunities by reachinglarge MySQL users (for example, Facebook and YouTube), who do notoverlap with the Solaris installed base
It's not a long report,but its well worth reading. As I've said before, Sun's move is a bigvote of confidence not only in MySQL but in Open Source in general
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