At MySQL, it's business as usual

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 29 January 2008 11:01

Opinion and Analysis

Lentz said he was happy with Sun's acquisition of MySQL.

"I still care for MySQL," he said. "I was with them from August 2001 until July last year when I set up my own operation. And I'm still a shareholder."

Lentz said prior to the sale, the company had been heading towards an IPO and planned to list on the Nasdaq.

He felt MySQL was far too small to list on the exchange, compared to the market in which it operates. "MySQL has some 'natural enemies' and its size would have made it extremely vulnerable to a takeover," Lentz said. "Let's say someone wanted to get rid of a competitor - buying it would have been easy for one of the bigger IT companies."

Lentz said either Microsoft or Oracle could easily have snapped up MySQL if it had gone public. Both companies had overlapping markets with MySQL and the little Swedish database was at one stage gaining clients from Oracle every single day.

"It wasn't that MySQL could do what Oracle can, just that Oracle had been deployed in many places where it was overkill - the needs of those outfits could be served just as well by MySQL," he said.

"Now I feel it has found a safe haven and we have to wait and see how it develops."

Smith said Sun's intentions were good and while the culture may change slightly it would not change to the extent that it would matter. "MySQL has the same culture as the wider FOSS movement," he said. "I'm not expecting any changes on the engineering side of things."

He said staff levels were expected to stay the same or even rise.

Lentz said running a company with a distributed workforce meant that the culture was difficult to transplant.

Smith laughed when I asked him whether there would be pressure for LAMP (the well-known acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl, the quartet that runs millions of websites) to become SAMP (the S is for Solaris, Sun's own Unix). "No, it's just business as usual," he replied.