%%CLICK_URL_UNESC%%

Welcome!

Background

Security Authors: Adrian Bridgwater, Pat Romanski, Andrew Hillier, Esmeralda Swartz, Paige Leidig

Related Topics: Oracle, Open Source

Oracle: Article

Why Oracle Keeping MySQL Alive Makes Business Sense: Mårten Mickos

"They can kill the business. But I don't think they will."
By Jeremy Geelan
Article Rating:
April 22, 2009 04:45 AM EDT
Reads:
 21,128

"Having MySQL makes business sense for Oracle," former MySQL's former chief executive, Mårten Mickos (pictured), told an interviewer this week as Oracle, through its proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems for $7.4BN, positioned itself to become the next owner of MySQL. Mickos does not agree with industry pundits who say that Larry Ellison will kill MySQL.

"Larry Ellison is smart.," Mickos told an interviewer at Forbes.com "MySQL was getting around 70,000 downloads a day when I left. It's an amazing grip on young developers."

In Mickos's view, with an installed based of 11-12 million, MySQL will above all allow Ellison to compete with Microsoft, "his [Ellison's] favorite enemy" as Mickos puts it.



Mickos's overall verdict."They can kill the business. But I don't think they will."

Another open source, luminary, Wordpress creator Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress runs its operations on MySQL) is also unfazed. He had this to say in his blog:

"Today our servers are running various versions of MySQL, tomorrow they’ll be running the same thing, and if need be ten years from now they can run the exact some software. Because of the GPL every WordPress user in the world is protected — we’re not beholden to any one company, only to what works best for us. Today that’s MySQL, tomorrow that’s MySQL, a year from now we’ll see."

Published April 22, 2009 – Reads 21,128
Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Jeremy Geelan

Jeremy Geelan is Chairman & CEO of the 21st Century Internet Group, Inc. and an Executive Academy Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Formerly he was President & COO at Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences across six continents. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.