Mickos served as chief executive officer for the open source database company from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL for $1 billion. Benchmark was a relatively early investor in the company; they participated in the $20 million Series B round together with Index Ventures back in 2003.

Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology and is also a board member of Mozilla Messaging and RightScale.

In the tweets announcing the move, Mickos says he likes Benchmark because they care about the needs of entrepreneurs and because they can ‘think big’. He will be joining Keith Krach, Mike Cassidy, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Dan Finnegan, Sarah Leary and Nirav Tolia as EIR at the Silicon Valley VC firm, which is behind a number of high-profile investments in web startups like Twitter, Gigya, Prosper, OpenTable, Mint.com and FriendFeed.

Anyone care to venture a guess as to when Mickos’ next Benchmark-backed startup will see the light of day?

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Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote about the acquisition on his blog, lavishing praise on MySQL: “MySQL is by far the most popular platform on which modern developers are creating network services. From Facebook, Google and Sina.com to banks and telecommunications companies, architects looking for performance, productivity and innovation have turned to MySQL. In high schools and college campuses, at startups, at high performance computing labs and in the Global 2000. The adoption of MySQL across the globe is nothing short of breathtaking. They are the root stock from which an enormous portion of the web economy springs.”

Startups with similar business models – managing a free open source project and bolting for-pay services on as a business model, will be happy to see this. Wordpress and OpenAds are two that we follow closely.

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The company, which has raised just $1.1 million in capital, has been on a tear lately. They acquired avatar startup Gravatar earlier this month. And Comscore says Wordpress.com had nearly 63 million unique worldwide visitors in September 2007, up 66% from May’s 38 million visitors. What I don’t know is the company’s revenue.

Building a real business around open source software is doable – see RedHat’s $4.1 billion market cap as an example. And rumor is that MySQL is planning an IPO of their own in the near future. For Automattic to spurn a $200 million offer means they are thinking along the lines of going public themselves, or at least a significantly higher acquisition price. Down the road, with the benefit of hindsight, we’ll know if they made the right decision or not.

Automattic declined to comment on this post.

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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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