The Head of Sun's Database Group Isn't Content to Generate Leads

Story by Al Riske. Photography by Howard Friedenberg.

16.December.08 - Marten Mickos was not eager to join the upstart database company run by his friends and former classmates.

“I would always say to them: 'Why don't you guys get real jobs?'” he recalls.

Creating an open-source database seemed almost silly to him then. After all, he told his friends, the world is full of databases.

That was in 1995.

“Then I joined a database company myself and said, 'Hey, you haven't got a chance. We will take down Oracle. We have funding, we have a business, we have more developers.'”

But by 1997, he found himself sending an email to David Axmark and Monty Widenius, the founders of MySQL, saying, 'Hey, guys, you're getting some traction!'”

They saved the email.

“Fast forward to December 2000,” Mickos says. “The founders were sitting in a kitchen talking, and they decided they needed a CEO, so they called me on the spot and said, 'Marten, we need a CEO and we think it's you.'”

He said no.

He did agree, however, to help his friends formulate their strategy and secure funding from venture capitalists.

And, after a couple of months, he did become CEO and they started building the business on a dual-licensing model borrowed from another open-source outfit, Ghostscript.

“Many people thought we invented it, but actually we perfected it,” Mickos says.

The way it works is simple. You can get MySQL through an open-source license, which costs you nothing but has certain reciprocity requirements, or you can buy a commercial license.

In simple terms, the GPL, or general public license, says: This is open source, but you have to be open source, too.

“I think it's perfect. That's how I operate in my life,” Mickos says. “When you come to my home, I open my kitchen for you and you eat and drink whatever you like, but when I visit you I expect to do the same. So I'm a big believer in reciprocity.”

On the other hand, you can go to a restaurant and pay for a meal and that's reciprocity, too.

“Take Cisco's intrusion detection device. They needed a database to embed in it,” Mickos says. “They come to us and say, 'MySQL, we like your product, but we are not going to open source ours. Is there any way around the reciprocity?' Then we say, 'Sure, if you pay us money, we will issue you a separate commercial license for the same bits.'”

MySQL started growing fast and Mickos thought the business model would take them far. Then, in 2003, they hired Zack Urlocker as VP of Marketing.

“Zack came to me one day and said, 'Marten, this dual licensing is great, but I don't think it will scale.'”

“I said, 'What do you mean it won't scale? It's scaling great. We're growing fast.'

“He said, 'Yeah, but look a few years into the future and see what's happening.'”

The problem is that the GPL's reciprocity requirement only kicks in with distribution of a derivative work.

“Well, if it's not a derivative work or if it's not distributed, there's no reciprocity requirement. If you run an internal application on MySQL, you are not distributing the software and you don't have to open your code. So there's no impetus to buy a commercial license. Or if you're a big website, same thing,” Mickos explains.

In other words, the market for software was changing dramatically. Software was becoming a service delivered over the Internet rather than a product distributed in a shrink-wrapped package.

“So we have to have a business model for those who do not distribute our software -- those who just distribute the outcome of the software,” Mickos says.

This is where we introduced the thinking, often quoted here at Sun, where we said: Some users are willing to spend any amount of time to save money. Others are ready to spend money to save time,” he says.

“If they have all the time in the world they probably won't buy from us, because they can do it themselves. But to those with more important things to do, we sell a subscription offering, which includes technology support, management tools, automation tools, deployment tools that just make life easier.”

Take Facebook, for example.

“Mark Zuckerberg grew up on MySQL. He probably downloaded it when he was 16 or 14, I don't know when. When he was 19, he created Facebook,” Mickos says. “When he was 21 or 22, he brought in VC money, and it still took a year before he said, 'My employees should not just keep managing MySQL databases; they should build the service.' So they came to us and became a paying customer.”

That approach -- offering added value, for a fee -- has been taking hold at Sun, which acquired MySQL earlier this year.

“There was a decision in the spring to make sure all our open-source products have one part that is for the community, for building momentum, for getting developers excited, and then there is this value-add for people who are ready to spend money to save time,” Mickos says.

“It was a shift in mind-set, but I also cautioned everyone that, 'Hey, it's not easy to settle on that distinction. So don't think that just by subscribing to the idea you have a solution in your pocket. You will make mistakes. You will have to figure it out. You will realize you have to develop something new. You have to modularize your code differently. It's not an overnight thing.'”

He wants to be very clear that he sees open source as a better way to develop and distribute software, and while many in the open-source world don't care about making money, he certainly does.

“We are building a software business. We are not building a marketing machine that can sell something else. We are building a software business. We are very happy when it has hardware drag and software drag and services drag, but we are not content to just be a lead-generation machine,” says the senior vice president of Sun's database group.

With MySQL, Sun now has a product that is both an alternative and a complement to databases produced by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and others.

“MySQL is the only major database in the world that was designed for the Internet. It was designed in 1995, when the Internet already existed. Whereas all the other products were created in an offline world. So this created major design differences. Maybe at the surface it looks similar. We have the same features. But still it's like we are an electric car and they are petrol cars,” Mickos says.

“When we go into a big corporation and they use, for instance, Oracle, they say to me, 'Marten, can we now replace all Oracle instances with MySQL?' I say, 'We have one of the fastest, most reliable, most easy to deploy databases in the world, but, no, we cannot run exactly the same load and we are not intending to run the same load.'”

For legacy applications, he tells customers, keep the database you have. For web-based applications, use MySQL.

“Goldman Sachs said already two years ago in one of their research reports that the shift to a web-based architecture in the enterprise is unstoppable. Corporations are going web internally. Across everything. When they do that, we become relevant to them,” he says.