Home
An Interview with Michael 'Monty' Widenius
Josette Garcia writes:
I met Michael “Monty” Widenius, founder of MySQL and co-author of MySQL Reference Manual (O’Reilly), during eLiberatica conference last month. As MySQL, Sun and Oracle are very much in the news at the moment, I thought you might want me to share with you some of the talks I had with Monty.
Q. When and why did you start MySQL or how did MySQL come about?
A. Netbas, the origin of the MySQL projected was started in 1981 after a discussion with Allan Larsson that there where not any good general database programs around. I said I had some ideas of how this should work and sent Allan a working prototype a week later. (Note that this was on a computer with 28K of ram!)
We used Netbas over years (changing names a couple of times: the last name was Unireg) to develop applications like book-keeping, warehouse systems etc. Over time we started to use it to store and aggregate data for large data warehousing applications. In 1995 we needed methods to generate web pages with information from the database. I removed the GUI interface from the application and report functions and instead added an SQL interface and MySQL was born.
David Axmark then convinced the other MySQL founders, Allan Larsson and me that we should release MySQL to the masses under a free and dual licenses product.
Q. Why did you sell MySQL to Sun?
A. When you take investors into a company, you have to agree that the company will either be sold or made public. We took in investors because David and I wanted to hire more people to do development on the MySQL Server and rapidly grow the usage of the product.
It was Mårten and the MySQL Ab's board decision to sell to Sun. I was not involved in the decision. I however thought at the time that Sun would be the best possible company to acquire MySQL as Sun has a development-driven organization. I thought Sun would be able to fix the challenges we had faced in the MySQL development organization which were causing fragmentation inside the company.
Q. How did Sun handle MySQL support? What were your responsibilities after the sale and did you become a Sun employee?
A. MySQL support in Sun had, until very recently, been working within Sun as an independent unit with very few changes. This part of the acquisition Sun handled very well. Now it looks like things are changing for the worse and it has already caused Support to lose some critical people. Oracle will face a real challenge in trying to keep the Support organization together.
I was hired to work in the CTO department in Sun as a Distinguished Engineer, but my role was never made completely clear. I also never signed any papers regarding my work for Sun.
I took on the following responsibilities while working for Sun:
- Trying to get Sun to understand the problems we had in the MySQL development organization and doing my best to help Sun to get them fixed
- Trying to buy time for Sun to get things fixed by actively convincing people who wanted to leave Sun to stay a bit longer to give Sun a change to fix things
- Working on the Maria storage engine project
- Helping Sun with their open source strategy and teaching them how to work with other open source projects
- Helping Sun understand how to do business with open source
- Trying to help Sun grow the OpenSolaris usage by 10x
- Hiring new open source talent to Sun
Q. We all heard that Oracle is buying Sun. What does it means for MySQL and its users? What does it means for Oracle?
A. For people that can use MySQL under the GPL (in other words, for internal usage in a company or with open source products) there is no big change. They can either use MySQL from Oracle or use MariaDB, the community developed version of MySQL, from askmonty.org.
For people who require use of MySQL under a commercial license, they now have to deal with Oracle instead of Sun. This should not change much as this is a good revenue stream for Sun/Oracle.
I did outline the different scenarios that Oracle could use in my recent blog, http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/04/to-be-free-or-not-to-be-free.html.
I hope that Oracle is buying MySQL as a way to learn how to work with the open source database market. If Oracle start to truly embrace open source (both in product and in mentality), then it would be a great win, both for Oracle and MySQL. This would ensure that Oracle would continue to be, for the foreseeable future, the dominant player in the database world. In that case it would be a devastating blow to the other closed database vendors, like Microsoft.
The other scenario is that Oracle is buying MySQL with the intention to slowly kill it while converting the MySQL customers and users to Oracle DB customers. The Open Database Alliance and Monty Program Ab have been created to ensure that there exist other options than Oracle for development, support and other services on MySQL.
Q. According to an article in LinuxFormat (Issue 120) "However, MySQL is thought to be under threat (well, in as much as a free software project can be) since it competes directly with Oracle's core business. It's significant that MySQL wasn't mentioned in the announcements from either Sun or Oracle..." - any comments?
A. I think it's very significant. It shows that Oracle has clear plans for what to do with MySQL but doesn't want anyone to know or even speculate about them yet.
Q. When I met you at eLiberatica, you were worried that Oracle might not allow independent companies to support/develop MySQL (using the name MySQL), something to do with the MySQL trademark. Has this issue been solved or is it now in the hands of the lawyers?
A. The problem is that Sun has recently started to take aggressive moves against even fair usage of the MySQL trademark. For example, Sun has told Google to not accept any 'adwords' advertisments on anything that contains the word MySQL. This makes it hard to use Google to tell the world that you are, for example, giving training on MySQL.
The decisions for this is in the hands of the lawyers and the justice department of the USA who are deciding whether Oracle will be allowed to acquire MySQL. Lets hope they know what they are doing.
Q. What is the MariaDB fork?
A. MariaDB is community-developed branch of MySQL. The difference between a branch and a fork is that a branch is keeping itself up-to-date with all changes in its original code while a fork continues on it's own way as an independent project.
Our goal is to keep MariaDB as a drop-in replacement for MySQL, but with more features, faster execution, cleaner code and less bugs.
We are actively engaging the developer community to work with us on MariaDB to ensure that MariaDB will be able to solve their business needs now and in the future.
Q. Since you sold MySQL, you took on a lot of other responsibilities - can you tell us what these are and the reasons behind them?
A. While at Sun, I started an investment company, Open Ocean Capital, through which we invest in disruptive technology start-ups that have a potential to change the world. We prefer to invest in open source products and products that have large user bases.
Open Ocean Capital have already invested in several companies and I am on the board of some of these.
I have also helped some companies in trouble by giving them some financial help. Most notable are The Software Freedom Law Center, Patentlens, the Human Creativity Project.
I encourage everyone who has made any money selling their business to give a part back to the community!
In addition, I have created a company that will help collectors find valuable hard-to-find items and I am about to create a gourmet restaurant in Finland that will use a database to deliver an unique experience to their guests.
After leaving Sun, I created Monty Program Ab to give a good home to MySQL developers and to fix the way that MySQL is developed. Monty Program Ab uses an unique way to drive it's business, the hacking business model, which in effect makes every employee an owner of the company.
In my spare time, I am also building a new house to live in and a new summer house to spend my vacations.
My main responsibilities are to my wife, family (including pets), friends (which include the people that I work with) and the MySQL/MariaDB product.
Q. What did you learn working with the Open Source community?
A. The answer to this one could easily fill a book. The short answer is:
- Open source is about trust. Trust in youself, the product you are developing and the people developing the product. If you lose that trust, you don't have anything to do in the open source community anymore
- Be always truthful and don't hide anything
- Avoid speaking about things you don't know about. If you compare your product to some other product, you need to have personal experience or a way to prove your facts, preferably an open source repeatable test
- Treat others with respect, even if they don't do the same to you. You will win in the long run while they just make fools of themselves
Q. New databases are being created all the time. One of the most known newcomer is Apache CouchDB. Is that a competitor to MySQL?
A. Unfortunately I don't know enough about CouchDB to be able to give a fair comparison. As far as I know, it's more about storing documents than dealing with lots of rows and is thus aimed toward a total different market than MySQL.
MySQL's strength is that it uses SQL, currently the most common language for accessing databases. It has a wide range of products supporting it.
Q. What is the recipe for black vodka? Don't worry if it is a trade secret :-)
A. Take 0.75 litres of vodka (any brand without a strong taste) and mix it in a bag of Salmiakki in the form of Turkish Pepper:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Pepper
This article has a lot of references to the black vodka.
Thank you Monty, I hope to meeting you at yet another conference.
Comments