Sun CEO Defends Purchase of Open-Source MySQL
Richard Koman, newsfactor.comWed Feb 27, 5:10 PM ET
Sun Microsytems closed its acquisition of Swedish open-source database company MySQL AB, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced on his blog Tuesday. He also announced a global marketing and support program.
Sun will start "rolling out global programs to raise awareness and adoption of MySQL among more established enterprises," Schwartz said. The main targets will be "institutions and independent software/service vendors looking to standardize on open-source architectures." With enterprise support programs for MySQL, Sun is "going all-out to sign up new customers, extending MySQL's reach," he said.
But Schwartz also took the opportunity to snap back at some "snarky" comments that have been made since the acquistion was announced a month ago.
Sensitive CEO
"There are still folks in the world who don't believe there's an economic model behind open source -- they thus believe $1 billion is an outlandish price to pay for MySQL. The most extreme among them see Linux, OpenSolaris or companies like SugarCRM as nothing more than playgrounds for hobbyists," he wrote.
Open source is a solid business model, Schwartz declared. "Companies that freely distribute their products, rather than limit access via pricing or proprietary licensing, are simply prioritizing adoption over immediate revenue." He pointed to Microsoft's recent announcement that it would make developer tools free to computer-science students.
"It's interesting that weeks after the MySQL deal was announced that Schwartz feels the need to defend the acquisition," said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT, in an e-mail. "Such sensitivity -- from an executive and company that have often demonstrated a 'my way or the highway' approach to public relations -- suggests that Sun has been having trouble articulating its overarching MySQL strategy."
Creative Leveraging
Schwartz cited Marten Mickos, MySQL's CEO, who he said describes the business market as a spectrum from those with more time than money to those with more money than time. "To win in the long run, you have to win on both sides of the spectrum -- with the same product. Crippling products or sneaky licensing exceptions don't work -- freedom does," Schwartz wrote.
The MySQL deal is not about the "economic model behind open source," King said, "but about acquiring and then applying in-house middleware assets to bolster other hardware, software and services business." Sun hopes to replicate IBM's creative leveraging of DB2, King added.
Schwartz also defended the $1 billion price. "First, the standalone business, unenhanced by Sun, was on a ramp to an IPO" which would have been valued at close to that purchase price. "Although a small (but growing) percentage of their downloads convert to purchase orders, 100 percent of those downloads require a hardware purchase -- for many, a server and storage device (for just as many, a laptop). We'd like to believe we can earn some of that business with solutions optimized for MySQL -- even if the end customer isn't (yet) paying for software."
Schwartz also took pains to contradict "conspiracy theories" that Sun only bought MySQL to turn it into a proprietary product. "Now, another concern forwarded to me was the conspiracy theory that wondered ... as soon as a big company owns MySQL, surely they'll adopt a nefarious proprietary license that levies extortionate rents for the simple act of storing and retrieving data?" he wrote.
That's absurd, Schwartz said. "One reason the integration of Sun and MySQL has gone so smoothly is our development and business models are nearly identical -- we both invest in very high-quality free software and the cultivation of large communities, then turn our efforts to monetize at the point of value for companies that want commercial support. We're peas in a pod." |
