[ Thanks to Curtis L.
Knight for this link. ]
“Talking last week with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, took me
back to the golden days of 1999. Here was a fresh-faced,
unbelievably enthusiastic CEO, raving about the future prospects of
his product, just like so many executives I met back in those
unreal times. But Mickos has a very real opportunity. The
open-source movement has become a major factor across the software
industry, and MySQL is the world’s most popular open-source
database.“In contrast to typical commercial software, open-source
products have their underlying programming code available for all
to see and modify. The products are also free or close to it,
which, needless to say, helps them grow rapidly if they’re good.
MySQL is used in four million installations around the world,
Mickos estimates. The product gets downloaded for free off the
company’s site about 30,000 times a day. And here’s what Sun CEO
Scott McNealy said in a February interview with Computerworld: ‘If
you want to save… money, make the default database MySQL. It’s
free, it’s bundled [with Sun’s Solaris software], you’ve got the
whole open-source community working on making it better. If Yahoo
and Google can run their entire operations on MySQL, then certainly
there’s a huge chunk of your operations that could run on it as
well…'”