One of the most-anticipated tech IPOs of the year has been that of open-source database company MySQL. It seemed like they were ready to go public back in the beginning of the year. Now I am hearing chatter from hedge fund circles that the filing may be imminent. Last I checked, nothing has been filed with the SEC yet. Investors, including Benchmark, Index, IVP, Intel, and SAP, have put in more than $39 million to date.
MySQL claims a 25 percent share of the database market. It is unclear how compelling its economics are, but if its IPO does well (assuming it ever happens), that would open the door eventually for other open-source startups such as Openads (open-source ad server) and Automattic (which has built a business on top of the open-source blogging platform, Wordpress), among others.
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Good for MySQL!
I already know this is going to sound like a dumb question/statement, but I find it interesting that companies can go for an IPO with very good but not better products. VMWare, I use it constantly, love it, but it’s very quirky. MySQL, absolutely great for some things but I still am not building an enterprise level app on it. Baidu, eh, NetSuite, eh, Clearwire, eh. RAG - get it. Others, eh.
This will be good for Open Source. It would prove that even a company that gives away 100% of it’s software and source code like Red Hat, can turn a real profit and make serious money.
A bad thing could be a takeover by shares, a hostile takeover, then closing the sources or ditching the GPL license. An IPO could do that. An investor like Microsoft could come in and ruin SQL for linux users everywhere. They would be in the crosshairs of antitrust legislation if they did that, but they could pressure an associate company to do it on their behalves like they did with Baystar and SCO.
http://yro.slashdot.org/articl.....08/1714234
“Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar’s investment in SCO.’ Despite the denials about their involvement, Microsoft helped SCO continue this charade — and on top of that halted all contact with Baystar after the investment, reneging on their guarantee.”
MSSQL licensing is out of control. People don’t use it. Microsoft could easily find another patsy like Baystar and get them to take over MySQL on shares, then pummel it into the ground in the same fashion.
I guess they’d be rich though while the rest of us rotted. I guess they earned that right. They should do it anyway.
Amy, there is no perfect software out there. Good software is best for something and not so good for other things. I.e. I would never use MSSQL or Oracle to build an online store for a small business. Speaking of enterprise apps - Zimbra is using MySQL for Enterprise email, and I believe, Comcast will use it for all their users’ email once they switch the over to Zimbra. So, MySQL might be able more mature then we are used to think about it.
Amy, maybe you should read this:
http://eliw.com/conference/mys.....igg-v3.pdf
It’s Microsoft looking for a hostile takeover bid?
More like Oracle?!
“It’s Microsoft looking for a hostile takeover bid?
More like Oracle?!”
Sorry, either or. Either or. If that happens SAP is going to be so pissed. I bet they take back the rights to MaxDB and redistribute it themselves as GPL.
So many companies put money into MySQL that it would be a catastrophic loss if the company was taken over by a competitor and slain.
Remember when SCO was demanding money from Linux users?
Saying it was going to sue everyone that used Linux like the RIAA?
Chris, hmmm interesting but I just wouldn’t compare Digg’s enviornment for services to say SalesForce or eBay. Digg just needs to be able to handle traffic and comments. There’s no enterprise level support with hundreds of employees needed to maintain it. But I hear you on mySQL; i’ve not used it in years.
@Exchange - fair enough, I write software and it’s not perfect, but we’re talking public company here. Anyway. I live off of MSFT products and platforms for my livelihood, & they probably helped set the bar lower than it might otherwise have been (and yes, yes I know that sofware is often released at 95% completion rate b/c the remaining 5% can take as long as the first 95%…).
“Chris, hmmm interesting but I just wouldn’t compare Digg’s enviornment for services to say SalesForce or eBay. Digg just needs to be able to handle traffic and comments. There’s no enterprise level support with hundreds of employees needed to maintain it. But I hear you on mySQL; i’ve not used it in years.”
This doesn’t mean anything without benchmarks done by a reliable test suite.
Back up the words with statistics.
Certain applications such as search engines that have a full index of the internet such as Yahoo, Google ect… can not use any SQL based relational database because they are impractical. At that level no commercial managed data storage system can work.
So there are always extremes. I know eBay runs on Sun and Oracle
http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/ebay.xml
What does it really mean?
windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/18741/18741.html
” Online auction mega-site eBay was offline for over 24 hours this weekend, causing an estimated $2-3 million loss of business for the company. But the company was eager to spread the blame and offset some of the embarrassment by blaming the outage on its reliance on software from Sun Microsystems and Oracle.”
Do you think Oracle handed them that 2-3 million in loss back because their software didn’t cut it? NOPE. That’s what EULAs are for and they all have them no matter how much you pay or how closed source/black box the database software is.
At least with MySQL and MaxDB, you can take the source code, and unit test it, and FIX BUGS. Geez…. I mean if you’re that IBMo enterprise, surely you have a couple coders to pee into MySQL and make it sweet for your implementation right?
folks, go look at every big investment bank (the ones who fund more IT development than anyone), you’ll see tons of Oracle, MSSQL, DB2, and Sybase - and much less mySQL/Postgres. Why??? because of support and scalability. Does mySQL have business intelligence and clustering on par with MSSQL or Oracle??? I think not.
I want to say that I checked eBay’s HTTP headers and they seem to be using IIS5 now for HTTP. I do not know if they switched off of Oracle as well???
“and much less mySQL/Postgres. Why???”
They have tons of money to throw around, enough to burn money in the furnace for warmth on a hot summer day. MS support can fix problems in their own software, but that tier of support from MS is like 200 bucks an hour. It’s very expensive. Digg wouldn’t survive one support incident on that tier.
“Why??? because of support and scalability. Does mySQL have business intelligence and clustering on par with MSSQL or Oracle??? I think not.”
MySQL-cluster can actually support up to 64 nodes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL_Cluster
“Currently a maximum of 64 nodes can belong to a single MySQL Cluster with up to 48 of those being data nodes. ”
That’s pretty big. Consider that an entire SAN with a single set of /var/lib/mysql files would be a single node, and the limit in the src’s is 64, and you can change that by modifying the sources. That’s pretty massive. I doubt it would respond too well if you pushed it, but still.
“Does mySQL have business intelligence and clustering on par with MSSQL or Oracle??? I think not.”
Are you talking about LINQ? Sun is putting that into Java now, and most of the FOSS languages are doing some type of LINQ-ish implementation. I know that MySQL had not implemented the XML storage specifications of the ANSI/ISO SQL 2005 standard, which I believe is yet to be ratified, but that’s pretty obscure.
Is that what you meant? Or are you just spewing business nonsense to look cool in the board room? hint, we’re not in the board room.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.....ar_winners
That is also a good link about MySQL.
You can browse all the sites that use it like Wikipedia, flickr and Youtube. I remember reading that it was used extensively in the auto industry as well.
Can you explain to me how a free, open source community makes money? What’s the revenue model?
eBay runs Oracle as their data stores and their web servers are IIS - with ISAPI filters. They have been like this for years.
mySQL is fine for a startup (like most of the sites covered on TC), but the money is in the enterprise and those companies go with the big boys.
If you are unfamiliar with business intelligence (cubes and anlaysis services in the MS world), it’s extremely compelling and a must have for enterprises. After talking to some mySQL DBAs, I don’t believe mySQL has anything like this.
Every big Co I know wants a 7 billion dollar budget behind a proprietary DB (I.e. your life line)
Now there is nothing wrong with a big Co taking the open source products and making mad $$$ at the expense of the devoted few that work tirelessly for no $$$ making the open source product what it is!
(cough…) DELL (sniff…)
it doesn’t matter if mysql is a toy compared to oracle, it is a toy a lot of people use, and a lot of those users pay for support.
many users of oracle are also mysql users. they are not mutually exclusive.
Chris has brought few good points there, I agree with him.
SCO group is going deadpool
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi.....2-2006.jpg
SCO should’ve sue Kenneth Brown, Linus Torvalds ,and Andrew S. Tanenbaum for millions. They took Unix stuff.
SCO should have died…like 2 months after they formed IMFHO…
JKennedy…“Ask not what your open source can do for you, but what you can do for open source”
GUID Nite!
” Online auction mega-site eBay was offline for over 24 hours this weekend, causing an estimated $2-3 million loss of business for the company. But the company was eager to spread the blame and offset some of the embarrassment by blaming the outage on its reliance on software from Sun Microsystems and Oracle.”
The idea is good
-Morpheus
http://this-week-gadgets.blogspot.com
When it’s time for the MySQL IPO, I’m ready to buy it, no question about that.
I’m surprised this story doesn’t even mention MySQL’s revenue, which was widely quoted earlier this year as being $50MM for 2006, up from $34MM the previous year. So they don’t really have 25% of the DB market (which I think is about $15B), just 25% of the usage by developers.
But I would say these numbers mean that there is huge potential for a MySQL IPO since there is vast potential to drive more adoption of the MySQL Enterprise products and associated modules and support / maintenance revenue.
Yaaaaawwwwnnnn!
… excuse me, you NTN’s said something?
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Does MySQL really count as open source, given the closed nature of their development? (We had to wrangle with similar issues recently.)
Also, in response to #3, they actually don’t give away 100% of their software to everyone. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing - it’s quite possibly a sounder business model - but let’s call a spade a spade. If you’re a commercial user, you should be paying for it.
If Microsoft really want to take over MySQL and grab a much bigger share of the DB market, then they can do that even now. With that much cash, they can make any type of offer to the MySQL guys.
The MySQL IPO will be filed after Nov 15, when MySQL AB will transfer company ownership from Sweden to the USA. Look for the filing to happen shortly after this event.
that is realy nice article about Mysql