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— Analysis —
The Finnish software pioneer, who founded open-source database management software company MySQL AB and sold it last year to Sun Microsystems Inc. for $1 billion, has offered his services to Oracle now that his brainchild is to be nestled inside the business software giant. With Oracle's pending $7.4 billion purchase of Sun, the future of MySQL, which has already been somewhat neglected inside the Silicon Valley server maker, rests in the hands of the global community of developers who tweak and update the database software's code base.
Widenius has offered to be an ambassador of sorts, to foster the critical relationship between MySQL's soon-to-be owner and its far-flung creative brain trust. "I will gladly work with Oracle to help them with something they don't understand, to be a contact for the community," says Widenius, 47. "But I suspect they just think this is a small project on the side and nothing to get too concerned about." The short history of MySQL inside of Sun illustrates the difficulty of acquiring an open-source company. Successfully melding community-based, open development of free software into a large technology company -- even Sun, whose CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has embraced the open-source movement -- is a challenge yet to be surmounted. Now that Oracle, which has its own proprietary database management product and whose reputation is hardly one of openness, has agreed to buy Sun, many, including Widenius, worry about the ultimate fate of MySQL. "I am hopeful that Oracle embraces a more open development process," Widenius says. "The problem is that Oracle doesn't have a history of doing that." Sun had a reasonable rationale for buying MySQL. The company expected to boost hardware sales by offering servers and storage systems optimized to run the database software. MySQL, after all, is optimized for Internet applications and some major Web names use it, including business networking service LinkedIn Corp. Getting companies to switch to MySQL also would free up significant funds that had been soaked up by expensive database licenses and could be spent instead on Sun's hardware. While these goals were achieved to some degree, before too long it became apparent to Widenius that the big corporation wasn't able or willing to capitalize on the vast development resources available in the open-source community. "Sun never used the community, so MySQL started to stagnate," he says. "I wanted to fix that within Sun, but it wasn't possible. People -- my friends -- started to drop out, and there was nothing I could do to keep them there." In November, when a new version of MySQL riddled with bugs was rushed out the door and released, Widenius' hopes faded further. By February, he had left Sun. "When Sun started losing people, the battle was already lost," Widenius says. "The one who defines the product isn't the one with the money; it's the one with the people's trust. And since Sun lost that trust, they lost control of the project." The "project" is arguably back in Widenius' hands now. Soon after leaving Sun, he founded and bootstrapped Monty Program AB, a company that aims to do something unique to open-source: It is developing database management software using the same base code used to build MySQL -- a "fork," in open-source parlance. The only reason Widenius was able to develop a product that is arguably better than his original software, he says, is because he hired many of the core engineers who developed MySQL in the first place and had bailed from Sun. MySQL users will virtually be able to pluck MySQL from their servers and drop in his new company's product, named MariaDB (for Widenius' daughter), he says. Oracle has said precious little about its plans for MySQL. In an FAQ issued when it announced the Sun deal, the company said it plans to maintain the software as an addition to its suite of database products. While he'd be overjoyed if Oracle reached out to him, Widenius isn't waiting around. "One way or the other, I'm going to do what I can to protect the users of MySQL." |
Monty Widenius is waiting for a call from Oracle Corp. that he knows will very likely never come.
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