How and why MySQL grabbed $1bn in five weeks

Mickos and Sun's Green dish the dirt

By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View • Get more from this author

Posted in Open Season, 18th January 2008 00:17 GMT

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Radio Reg When one of technology's major players lays down $1bn for an open source software maker, the Open Season crew must swing into action. To our credit, we swung in style this week, getting Sun - the acquirer - software chief Rich Green and MySQL - the acquired - CEO Marten Mickos on the horn.

Matt Asay of Alfresco fame, Dave Rosenberg of Mulesource fame and I of infamy reached Green and Mickos at a MySQL conference in Orlando, Florida. Most of the MySQL staff were shocked to learn about the deal, which only took five to six weeks to nail down. As Mickos tells it, the MySQL team is happy to head over to a R&D-heavy company such as Sun.

As Matt and Dave see it, Sun may well become the center of the open source universe, acquiring a bevy of companies. Are Matt and Dave jealous of Marten's riches? Yes they are.

"It has been like walking around in a candy story," Mickos said, after looking over Sun's vast computing labs.

Green also expressed his joy around obtaining the M in the LAMP stack and said Sun will looking to throw LAMPs at as many customers as possible, leaving SAMP (Solaris) to do its own thing.

"There is no way we are going to skew artificially the solutions we put in the market," Green told us.

Looking ahead, the MySQL deal may be the first in a number of Sun acquisitions around so-called "cloud" or utility computing.

"It is clear that we're going after the web economy," Green said.

You'll get all the dirt on this action packed show.

Open Season - Episode 10

The faithful can grab the Ogg Vorbis file here, those plagued by low-bandwidth can catch a smaller, crappier quality show here and those of you with macho-sized bandwidth can get the big daddy here.

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Thanks for your ears. ®

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