Q: In terms of challenges, no external challenges? They’re all internal to the company?

Externally, it’s a fantastic new world. Sure we have competitors. They will take all kinds of actions. We already see some serious actions by the establishment when they realize that the whole world is going LAMP.

Marten Mickos, MySQL CEO

But, you know, I just see them [the competitors’ actions] as welcome new things, they give more credibility to open source, they give us more attention. Look at Oracle – they’re distributing MySQL from their Web site. (Laughs) I think that’s just wonderful!

Q: Is that a new development?

When they announced that they’re supporting Linux, they put a Linux distro on their Web site for anybody, and it includes MySQL.

Go to the Oracle.com and click on the links to the Linux page and download it, and open the package and you’ll find us there. This is the power of open source, that anybody can distribute our community version. And even those guys do it.

Q: What is their motivation for doing it?

I have no idea. You must ask them. Maybe they didn’t think of it, maybe they didn’t realize that MySQL is included, how do I know? Or maybe they think that MySQL is such a great database that it’s worth distributing. Maybe they needed to distribute a very fast database. (Laughs)

Q: Anything else to add?

I always say that I’m thankful for all the press attention we get, but I think there’s a bigger issue at hand. We have the LAMP stack but the companies around it are more than just L and A and M and P.

For this to make sense to the world and to be useful to six billion people on this planet, there needs to be applications and all kind of services on top of the LAMP stack – and those are now happening and that’s a very interesting thing.

So look at Pentaho, Alfresco, JasperSoft, ActiveGrid, Zimbra, OpenBravo, Zmanda – those guys are building very innovative new stuff on an open source platform. And they’re growing like crazy.