A discussion of hybrid open source and proprietary licensing models.

[Joseph Lorenzo Hall <joehall AT gmail.com>]

I wonder why MySQL hasn't transitioned to a more subscription-based
model like RedHat... that seems to have done wonders for them (I don't
entirely know what I'm talking about so take this with a grain of
salt... just to get some discussion going on OS biz models). -Joe


On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 10:04:51 -0700, Mike Linksvayer
<ml AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
> Rob Myers wrote:
> > One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is how Open Source made MySQL
> > commercially viable. I certainly wouldn't have started selling a new
>  > database at the moment when Oracle and Microsoft were consolidating
>  > their stranglehold on the market in the late-1990s. Without Open
>  > Source, MySQL would not have got the mindshare, exposure and community
>  > of users required to make it commercially successful.
> 
> In this case there's even a counterfactual: in the mid-90's mSQL (free
> as in beer for most purposes, source available) was popular for low-end
> web apps on unix.  Hughes Consulting of Australia (the mSQL vendor,
> IIRC, I'm offline at the moment) didn't want to open source mSQL, and
> over a very brief time (~1996) saw their share killed by MySQL.  Now
> MySQL is a thriving business.
> 
> I like PostgreSQL better, and it appears to have corporate-financed
> development with a non-copyleft (BSD-like) license, but that's another
> story that I don't know much about.
> 
> --
>    Mike Linksvayer
>    http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
UC Berkeley, SIMS PhD Student
http://pobox.com/~joehall/
blog: http://pobox.com/~joehall/nqb2/