Closing MySQL: Marten Mickos Responds

April 23, 2008

Posted by: Glyn Moody

GM: Does this not undermine the story that you've been telling people over the years about how wonderful open source is because of all these benefits - you're saying well, actually we're not going to use those benefits for some of our code?

MM: Sure, that's of course the worrisome conflict here. And that's why I am saying that we are pragmatists more than dogmatists - meaning if it takes an occasional non-GPL feature to be a successful GPL company, then I'm ready to do so. I absolutely believe in open source and I continue to do so, but the world is not perfect, and until we've figured out the most wonderful business model that works without these things, then we'll experiment with these things.

It's a little bit similar with software patents. We think they should be abolished, but until they are abolished, we need to operate in that world. MySQL actually has some software patents, because we acquired a product some year ago, we got some software patents with it. I'd rather be pragmatic and successful than dogmatic and risking extinction.

GM: Isn't that a tacit admission that the pure open source model isn't really working as well as you'd like it to, and therefore you are being forced to do things which you'd rather not?

MM: It's an admission that open source doesn't solve all business model issues. Like I said, the world is not perfect. A few years from now we may all be operating in the cloud, no software is being delivered anyhow, everything is used as a service, and that actually will be a great business model. Some smart people have suggested - and that's part of our planning - that we should by offering MySQL in the cloud, offering it as a service to people, and when we do that we will be able to be both open source and charge money for the service we provide.

GM: Given that that sounds like a perfect solution, what's stopping you from jumping into the cloud now?

MM: We will be, it's just that the technology isn't ready yet: the complete technology isn't ready yet, customers aren't ready, the infrastructure is not there. You can see it coming, and I think you're seeing it clearly coming with Amazon and others and Sun working on it, [but] it hasn't taken over the world yet.

With backups specifically, which this whole discussion is partly about, there are ideas about providing backup as a cloud service, as a hosted service. So you'd run your database at home, or wherever you are in your office, and you'll push your backups out to the cloud, or to a hosted service, so that you don't need to worry about it.

GM: So is this backup addon a necessary step towards the cloud then?

MM: The addon's not, but the API [is]. Unfortunately everybody's focussing now on the addon and taking that as a sign that the whole world is collapsing, and MySQL is close-sourcing, but they should pay attention to the API, because that's the interesting thing here.

We always had a storage engine API inside MySQL, but when we really opened it, documented it, told people about it, we got an enormous amount of innovation around the storage engine API. This year at the MySQL conference we had five or six storage engine partners, each building their storage engine for MySQL, fantastic innovation, some of them open source, some of them closed source. Nobody yelled or screamed that some of the storage engines are closed source, people are just happy that there's new innovation happening.

And I know MySQL will always be held to a different standard than its partners, but the question that people have asked is, so why is it OK to be a partner of MySQL and have commercial plugins for MySQL, but why cannot MySQL the company do it themselves?

GM: Perhaps the reason is that some people would say you're the most important open source company, and therefore set the example for everyone else to follow?

MM: And that's what I'm saying: I must take it as an honour. Of course we didn't communicate this thing right, we have only ourselves to blame for this coming out the wrong way; but apart from that, we've gone through PR controversies before in our lives, and they can be very painful when they happen, and people think the sky is falling, but many times they lead to very useful outcomes. Because when people really are passionate or upset or angry, they also may come up with some of their best ideas.

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