Free software’s second era: The rise and fall of MySQL

“If the first era of free software was about the creation of the
fully-rounded GNU/Linux operating system, the second saw a
generation of key enterprise applications being written to run on
that foundation. Things got moving with the emergence and rapid
adoption of the LAMP stack – a term coined in 1998 – a key
part of which was (obviously) MySQL (the “M”).

“But unlike the “A” and “P” in LAMP, which remained close to
their hacker roots, MySQL grew under the guidance of Marten Mickos
into one of the first successful open source companies not based
around GNU/Linux distros. A few years ago, Mickos explained to me
where one of his company’s key ideas – that of owning the
copyright to all the contributed code – came from:

“There are some natural reasons for it. One is that the vast
majority of the original source code was written by one man —
Monty [Widenius]. Now his portion is much, much smaller, but at
that time, most of the code was written by him. So it was natural
that the copyright was held by the company. But second, Monty and
David [Axmark] learned from the Ghostscript project. They were the
first implementers of the dual-licensing model where you retain
copyright but at the same time you release it under open
source.”

Complete Story