MySQL AB

Last updated

MySQL AB
Company type Private company
Industry Computer software
Genre Database software
Founded1995
Founder Michael Widenius, David Axmark and Allan Larsson
Defunct2008
FateAcquired by Sun Microsystems
Successor Oracle Corporation
Headquarters
Key people
Products MySQL, MySQL Cluster
Number of employees
400
Website www.mysql.com

MySQL AB was a Swedish software company founded in 1995. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, [1] Sun was in turn acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010. MySQL AB is the creator of MySQL, a relational database management system, as well as related products such as MySQL Cluster. The company was dually headquartered in Uppsala, Sweden, and Cupertino, California, with offices in other countries (France (Paris), Germany (Munich), Ireland (Dublin), Italy (Milan), and Japan (Tokyo)).

Contents

MySQL AB had 400 employees in 25 countries, [2] and Open-source model companies. Around 70% of the employees were remote workers. [3]

Together with Linux, Apache, and PHP, the MySQL Server forms one of the building blocks of the LAMP technology stack. The company claimed over 5 million MySQL installations and over 10 million product downloads in 2004.

Revenue

MySQL AB representatives are commonly cited as champions of what they claim to be a "second generation" of open source companies.[ citation needed ] The revenues of both first and second generation open source companies usually derive from selling support, consulting services, and training for their products. What generally distinguishes this "second generation" of companies, such as MySQL AB and Trolltech, from earlier "open source" business models is dual licensing  — the software is supplied under an open source license, but traditional software licences are also sold by the company that owns the software. As an example, MySQL AB makes MySQL available under the GPL at no charge, but sells it under other more traditional licenses to clients who do not find the GPL to be ideal for their purposes, such as inclusion of MySQL AB technology in a closed source product.

Other sources of revenue for MySQL AB were providing support and consulting, as well as training and certification for MySQL Server. Together with some additional services, MySQL also provided a subscription-based product called MySQL Enterprise, which is also resold by other companies such as Dell, HP, and Novell.

History

A third round of about $18.5 million financing led by Institutional Venture Partners, including Intel Capital, Red Hat, SAP Ventures, and others was disclosed in February 2006. [5] [6] On 16 January 2008, MySQL AB announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems for approximately $1 billion. [2] [7] [8] [9] [10] The acquisition completed on 26 February 2008. Oracle Corporation then acquired Sun in 2010.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MySQL</span> SQL database engine software

MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database organizes data into one or more data tables in which data may be related to each other; these relations help structure the data. SQL is a language that programmers use to create, modify and extract data from the relational database, as well as control user access to the database. In addition to relational databases and SQL, an RDBMS like MySQL works with an operating system to implement a relational database in a computer's storage system, manages users, allows for network access and facilitates testing database integrity and creation of backups.

Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. In 2023, the company’s seat in Forbes Global 2000 was 80. The company sells database software and cloud computing. Oracle's core application software is a suite of enterprise software products, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, human capital management (HCM) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software, enterprise performance management (EPM) software, Customer Experience Commerce and supply chain management (SCM) software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sun Microsystems</span> American computer company, 1982–2010

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oracle Solaris</span> Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems

Solaris is a proprietary Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. After the Sun acquisition by Oracle in 2010, it was renamed Oracle Solaris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Movable Type</span> Blogging software

Movable Type is a weblog publishing system developed by the company Six Apart. It was publicly announced on September 3, 2001; version 1.0 was publicly released on October 8, 2001. The current version is 8.0.

MaxDB is an ANSI SQL-92 compliant relational database management system (RDBMS) from SAP AG, which was also delivered by MySQL AB from 2003 to 2007. MaxDB is targeted for large SAP environments e.g. mySAP Business Suite, and other applications that require enterprise-level database functionality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Widenius</span> Finnish software programmer

Ulf Michael Widenius, also known as Monty, is a Finnish software programmer. He is the main author of the original version of the open source MySQL database, a founding member of the MySQL AB company and CTO of the MariaDB Corporation AB. Additionally, he is a founder and general partner at venture capital firm OpenOcean.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free and open-source software</span> Software whose source code is available and which is permissively licensed

Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is available under a license that grants the right to use, modify, and distribute the software, modified or not, to everyone free of charge. The public availability of the source code is, therefore, a necessary but not sufficient condition. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term for free software and open-source software. FOSS is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright or licensing and the source code is hidden from the users.

Multi-licensing is the practice of distributing software under two or more different sets of terms and conditions. This may mean multiple different software licenses or sets of licenses. Prefixes may be used to indicate the number of licenses used, e.g. dual-licensed for software licensed under two different licenses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LAMP (software bundle)</span> Acronym for a common web hosting solution

A LAMP is one of the most common software stacks for the web's most popular applications. Its generic software stack model has largely interchangeable components.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mårten Mickos</span> Finnish businessman

Mårten Gustaf Mickos is a technology executive based in San Francisco. He is the current CEO of HackerOne, a security vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform.

OpenJDK is a free and open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition. It is the result of an effort Sun Microsystems began in 2006. The implementation is licensed under the GPL-2.0-only with a linking exception. Were it not for the GPL linking exception, components that linked to the Java Class Library would be subject to the terms of the GPL license. OpenJDK is the official reference implementation of Java SE since version 7.

Companies whose business centers on the development of open-source software employ a variety of business models to solve the challenge of making profits from software that is under an open-source license. Each of these business strategies rest on the premise that users of open-source technologies are willing to purchase additional software features under proprietary licenses, or purchase other services or elements of value that complement the open-source software that is core to the business. This additional value can be, but not limited to, enterprise-grade features and up-time guarantees to satisfy business or compliance requirements, performance and efficiency gains by features not yet available in the open source version, legal protection, or professional support/training/consulting that are typical of proprietary software applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Greenplum</span> American data technology company

Greenplum is a big data technology based on MPP architecture and the Postgres open source database technology. The technology was created by a company of the same name headquartered in San Mateo, California around 2005. Greenplum was acquired by EMC Corporation in July 2010.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MariaDB</span> Database management system

MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the original developers of MySQL, who forked it due to concerns over its acquisition by Oracle Corporation in 2009.

Zmanda Inc. is an open-source software and Cloud backup software company. It is headquartered in the United States. In partnership with open source companies such as Sun and MySQL, the company contributed to open source projects. Zmanda was acquired by Betsol in May, 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation</span> Agreement announced in 2009 and completed in 2010

The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation was completed on January 27, 2010. After the acquisition was completed, Oracle, only a software vendor prior to the merger, owned Sun's hardware product lines, such as SPARC Enterprise, as well as Sun's software product lines, including the Java programming language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-core model</span> Business model monetizing commercial open-source software

The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of commercially produced open-source software. The open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software. The term was coined by Andrew Lampitt in 2008.

DreamFactory develops both commercial and open-source software that provides self-hosted integration and API generation services to multiple applications in cloud-based or on-premise environments.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to MySQL:

References

  1. "Múltiples noticias se refieren a la adquisición". Google Noticias (in Spanish). Retrieved 27 June 2022.
  2. 1 2 "Sun to Acquire MySQL". MySQL AB. Archived from the original on 17 January 2008. Retrieved 16 January 2008.
  3. Hyatt, Josh (31 May 2006). "Fortune: MySQL: Workers in 25 countries with no HQ". Fortune . Archived from the original on 13 April 2010.
  4. "MySQL Launches MySQL Network for Corporate Enterprises Looking to Fast-Track Open Source Database Deployment". Press release. 15 February 2005. Archived from the original on 14 December 2005. Retrieved 9 October 2016.
  5. "MySQL AB Secures $18.5 Million in Series C Funding; IVP Leads Intel Capital, Red Hat, SAP Ventures & Presidio STX in an Investment Round to Provide for Continued Enterprise Growth for the World's Most Popular Open Source Database". Press release. 13 February 2006. Archived from the original on 10 October 2016. Retrieved 9 October 2016.
  6. "Form D: Notice of Sale of Securities" (PDF). US Securities and Exchange Commission. 16 March 2006. Archived (PDF) from the original on 10 October 2016. Retrieved 9 October 2016.
  7. Jonathan Schwartz. "Helping Dolphins Fly". Blog. Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on 17 January 2008. Retrieved 16 January 2008.
  8. "Sun acquires MySQL". MySQL AB. 16 January 2008. Archived from the original on 17 January 2008. Retrieved 16 January 2008.
  9. "MySQL blogs: Sun acquires MySQL". Archived from the original on 17 January 2008.
  10. "(en) « Investor Relations – FAQ » [archive], Sun Microsystems (consulté le 16 janvier 2008)".