Sam Varghese
Thursday, 29 January 2009 04:45
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 5
iTWire: So after '95, till 2008 when you were bought by Sun you ran on the same licence that you were using since '95?
Monty: We actually did change the licence. We were the second program that I know of that used dual licensing. But back then we were not sure if you could use GPL from the start, and we needed some money to be sure that we could concentrate on working only on the product that we believed in. So we had a commercial licence. It was kind of open source but this was before open source. The licence basically said you could use it freely, but if you made money on it directly, then you needed to pay a small licence fee back.
iTWire: What do you mean by directly?
Monty: For example, if you had a commercial web service then... if you sold the web server you needed to give something back. For the Windows platform we had a shareware licence which basically said you can use it freely for 30 days, but after 30 days you should pay us a fee. But there were no restrictions in the code. It was just that you get a bad feeling if you didn't pay. Basically we used the Windows licence to bootstrap our business. In 2000 we changed to GPL because by then we had got the ball rolling to the extent that we could afford to do it.
iTWire: MySQL used to accept contributions from outsiders. You had something like the current process which Sun has, isn't it?
Monty: In the beginning, we just said that you need to give us free access to the code. We actually had quite an active community until around 2001. Then I employed Marten Mickos to lead the company, and he employed more developers in-house. I was the one who ensured that all emails were answered so that anybody who had any questions would get an answer. If somebody sent a patch I would ensure it was reviewed at once, and then if we got agreement that we could use the code, we would use it.
But by 2001 I didn't have time to do this any more. Hence, we needed to employ somebody else to do that. And Marten said back then that we didn't need anybody to do open source because everybody was doing open source. I disagreed, but I didn't have a choice because I didn't have time. That was the time when we stopped being a real active community. We've still been active with the customers and everything else, but we haven't been active enlarging the community - the developers' community.
We have been enlarging the user base and the customer base, but not the community. And that was something I was pretty angry with, and it took me until 2005 - basically four or five years - until we got some community people and started to work actively with the community again.
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