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April 16, 2004

How Far Can Open Source Go?

Marten Mickos, MySQL CEO, is delivering the first keynote of the final day at MySQL 2004.

Starts by asking: Is Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA) the richest man in the world? Some calculation somewhere says yes.

MySQL is just one little planet in the open source galaxy, which is just one incarnation of the creative commons.

Marten describes a range of software offerings in three ways; toy, what customers want and overkill. MySQL has hit solidly into the "what customers want." 90% of the features at 10% of the cost. Marten believes the software industry is doomed if software continues to have bloated prices, that some adjustment is needed. In the long term and adjustment will be healthy for the software industry. MySQL is a part of the revival.

The airline analogy, how do you fly free of charge? Join the crew. If you contribute to the effort you can use it for free. If you are in 1st class or on the crew you arrive at the destination at the same time.

There are a lot of people making money from MySQL. The ISPs that use mysql make much more than MySQL AB did last year.

A plea from Marten for the audience to contribute more, help MySQL AB increase productivity by 6 times. The exchange is that the customer saves money but needs to contribute by advocating MySQL and contributing to the development. MySQL will not venture into services or hardware, but will remain in the software industry.

(diagrams not

Open source is a rising tide. IBM, Oracle, Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, SAP, Novell, venture functing, government, Microsoft (has released some code under open source).

4 stages of opens source adoption
1 - what's open source
2 - yes, we run Linux
3 - yes, we have an open source stack
4 - our architecture is built on open source

Marten says they haven't had to touch the venture funding they got awhile back, been able to cover operations with revenue from license and support.

Success of MySQL is dependant on the approval of the MySQL community.

Ownership of source code is good and should be protected, but patents isn't the right way to do that.

The commitment: "In the next few years MySQL AB will pass to its customers savings totalling more than $1 billion"

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