During the recent MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL, now Vice-President of the Database Division at Sun, announced some changes to MySQL’s development model that has since caused a lot of e-ink to flow in the blogosphere. According to Marten, some new features will only be built into the enterprise version of MySQL, and not be included in the (free) community version.

The protests generated by this announcement are really surprising.  The next day, Slashdot would generate a very animated debate under the headline Sun May Begin Close Sourcing MySQL Features (500 comments in less than one day).

First, it seems unfair to attribute this decision to Sun.  As Marten himself reacted to the Slashdot post, “The business decision on this was made by MySQL AB (by me as the then CEO) prior to the acquisition by Sun, so this has nothing to do with Sun. On the contrary, Sun is more likely to influence this decision the other way.”

Second, most open source players use this dual licensing mode, including of course Talend. Nothing new here, I had already written about it in eBizQ in novembre 2007: “The business model of for-profit open source companies relies on revenue from service, consulting and training - even in the cases where vendors have chosen the dual licensing model in order to offer both high value added commercial solutions and free community versions.”

Matthew Aslett further commented on the 451 Group blog: “Sun (or MySQL) is not going to begin closing the source code of MySQL features, but it is going to introduce new features into the Enterprise Edition that will not be available under an open source license.”  The difference is sizeable, and of course MySQL remains open source!

I will leave the last work to Marten, who also commented on the 451 blog: “If the world were perfect, we would only produce GPL code and we would have a great business that cna fund the software development. But we have found that the world is not perfect. We have been experimenting with a variety of business models around FOSS (dual licensing, support only, simple subscriptions, different binaries for community and enterprise, non-open source features) to find the best one. And we will continue to experiment until we are satisfied. We need to find a model that allows us to produce a ton of great code under GPL while having the financial strength to do all this.”  I fully support this position.

Open source vendors should not only focus on short term customer and user satisfaction.  It is much more beneficial for all parties involved to also ensure the long term existence of the vendor!

Bertrand