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Yesterday I had the opportunity to listen to Marten Mickos deliver the opening keynote at the MySQL conference here in Santa Clara. As usual, Marten does an enviable job at delivering a presentation which talks about MySQL’s business, its new relationship with Sun Microsystems, and what this all has to do with Open Source.

I’ve been lucky to hear Marten speak at a number of events, and have found that one of the most consistent themes can be distilled down to this (which we at Hyperic fully subscribe to):

Build a great product, Empower your Users, Build a great business

He also reiterated the importance of the GPL as an essential element to drive empowerment of users. This lets them adopt products and participate while creating an opportunity for businesses to deliver value people are willing to pay for. A virtuous cycle, right? Sun seems to think so also (a billion dollars is not the type of money any company throws around lightly)

Ironically, as I was in the middle of writing this post, Slashdot’s editors let out this gem in a post claiming that MyS^H^H^HSun had “begun to close source MySQL”. Luckily, Marten was able to set the knee-jerk cable-news-inspired Slashdot post straight by again explaining to the readers that MySQL is a business which has been able to build a great free, open, GPL database by creating value they don’t necessarily give away. He’s candid about the fact that they are experimenting trying to arrive at the best business model that balances all the elements of the above equation. Obviously, it’s not easy and someone’s undoubtedly going to get upset with the result. Apparently some people on Slashdot think MySQL’s database is written by monks who are morally opposed to any compensation.

Why is this important? Well, because software doesn’t build itself. Another admirable (if slightly more outspoken) guy named Marc Fleury made a big point of that with JBoss’ “Professional Open Source” business model. Everyone got what they wanted: the community got a great, free, open J2EE app server, and JBoss got paid to hire more people to continue to build it.

Recently there were a few examples of failed companies in the management space which either directly used open source or had some connection to it in their businesses. Many wonder if the failure had something to do with open source, their choice of license, or the business model. Few (if any) looked at the more obvious part: the products offered by those companies. Just because something is free and open source, it doesnt mean people will flock to it. Without that first element of the equation, there’s no adoption and no opportunity to create value people will pay for. The result is a failed business. The formula for creating that value is still being developed and is different for every company. We’ve chosen one which so far has brought us much success, but might not work for others.

Much like MySQL, we’re eager to experiment with different ways in which we can deliver the best products to the largest audiences while delivering financial success for our employees and investors. Over the course of this year, you’ll see us continue to enhance and deliver more features and functionality to our open source platform, while continuing to enhance the value of our various subscription offerings. Also like MySQL, we’re eager to engage our community directly as we experiment and learn how to continue to build the best solution to managing large scale web infrastructure.