This week saw some important management news for the open source communities and startup companies that rely on open source software, specifically MySQL, the ‘M’ of the LAMP technology stack.
CNET Open Source columnist Matt Asay was one of the first to officially announce Marten Mickos to leave Sun in reorg. Marten Mickos was CEO of MySQL since 2001 prior to the Sun Microsystems acquisition announced just 1 year ago.
This week also saw Michael “Monty” Widenius, the creator of MySQL formally leave Sun as well as he comments on his blog Time to move on. The trifecta is that former MySQL 2IC under Marten Mickos Zac Urlocker has also recently moved from the Sun Database Group structure formed under Marten Mickos for the MySQL acquisition into a separate position within Sun.
Will the exodus continue along with plenty of significant names in 2008 such as Jim Starkey the falcon storage engine creator, and Brian Aker the creator of the MySQL fork Drizzle?
More importantly, what is the impact to MySQL, the MySQL Community and the larger open source ecosystem that is a core for new startups? As quoted by Marten Mickos, “[MySQL] Business is great. We just closed a multimillion-dollar deal recently that confirms much of the momentum we’ve made. We just closed our best quarter ever.” The exodus of
skills and resources will not be lost, these talented resources will find new opportunities and will continue to actively contribute to the larger tech community.
This post was written by Ronald Bradford who is a 2 decade veteran of the database industry across Ingres, Oracle and MySQL. Having actively worked with open source products in the Internet industry for 10 years, he now works actively in the New York tech industry providing consulting expertise. Ronald is also the Principal of 42SQL.