My company has 9 production MySQL servers.

Our company does:

over 4 billion queries a week — an average of over 450,000 per machine, though in reality 2 servers do near 1 billion themselves, 5 do about the average, and 2 do much less (about 65k and 100k queries).

receive over 1380 GB (almost 1.35 TB!!) of data per week, an average of over 153 GB per server.

send out over 1400 GB of data per week, an average of 157 GB per server.

Our hardware is only somewhat beefy — 64-bit architecture, 3.20 GHz Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU, 6GB of RAM in 4 of the 5 most-used servers (4GB in the others).

We make over USD $220,000 per week ($10 billion per year) in sales for our web application.

If we bought the highest level of service, Platinum, for all 9 production machines, the cost would be 0.40% of our sales. The cost would be less than the cost of a new IT person (even a junior IT person!), and …

Back when I posted How “Open” Do You Have To Be To Be Open Source?, Mårten Mickos e-mailed me asking what I thought of various models of charging for open source, and how I thought they ‘rated’.

Or should we just say “whatever business model, as long as it works and users get what they want”?

Q: Why should businesses charge at all?
A: Because people work hard and deserve to get paid for that work, and folks should give up a part of their own hard-earned money because they get value out of that work.

Q: But why do we need to be paid at all?
A: There are expenses to meet — business expenses, and every employee has personal expenses.

In an ideal world, there would be a free exchange of ideas, services and goods. Unfortunately, this only works for …

Let us recap the successful open source business models thus far:

1) Sell stuff around Open Source. O'Reilly is the obvious winner in this arena. Their books and conferences go hand in hand with the open source community.

2) Support. IBM Global Services does an amazing job at this. Do you have something built on an Open Source stack that you need supported? They support most anything. Look at HP's announcements as of late and you can see that they are quickly trying to move into this area.

3) Update Services. Ask those who buy Redhat Network what the value is in the model and they will tell you that it is in updates. There is minimal monitoring built into Redhat Network, but the real value is in the updates.

4) Dual License. Give away the software and for those who can not use the software under an open source license, sell them a commercial license. This is the …

Interview with Mark Spencer:
http://www.asteriskvoipnews.com/asterisk_news/new_mark_spencer_interview_creator_of_asterisk.html

Mark Spencer is the author of Asterisk, the open source PBX system,
and is the primary owner of the company Digium which commercializes
it. Asterisk has the real potential to have a long term ability to
commoditize much of the telecom industry. Used Skype Out? Then your
call was probably routed via Asterisk by one of Skype's partners.

If you are an employee at MySQL then you have used Asterisk since it is our PBX system.

Catch the last question to Mark and his answer:
Question: Why are you planing to release a new stable version every 6
month? Many people have the feeling that a PBX software should …

A friend from a large enterprise (buy side of open source) sent me an email today. I had asked for his opinion on how to improve the Open Source Business Conference, a show I and a few friends founded a few years back. He said something in the course of his email that I found very interesting, if difficult to deliver:

[You need to show] [h]ow to decide which OpenSource product is really cool and does what it says on the tin and which is vapourware\aspirational.

What Open Source products have my competitors used? Successfully. And unsuccessfully....

I like the panels - especially when they disagree. One of the things I find a bit discomfiting at conferences is when all the shiny, happy people on a panel agree...

... the core thing that I try and get through to my senior, senior management is the understanding that Open Source is NOT a panacea; is not totally free; …

Shai Agassi, president of SAP's products and technology group said yesterday that he expects MySQL to be certified to run SAP applications by the end of the year.  This is an excellent endorsement not only of MySQL, but of open source technology in general.  SAP R/3 is the benchmark when it comes to the most sophisticated and demanding enterprise application and the testing process is exhaustive (if not exhausting!)  And even for users who may never need to run SAP, it's good to know that MySQL will be able to standup to all the testing.

It's something we've been working on for quite some time with SAP and it's nice to see that the top execs are aware and supportive of our efforts.  Agassi has sometimes been misunderstood in his comments on open source, but in our view, they've always been a huge supporter.

• …

After several months of back and forth negotiation, MySQL and Oracle have agreed to a multi-year extension to the existing contract enabling MySQL to continue to sell and support the InnoDB storage engine.  The terms of the agreement are very much "business as usual" for both companies.

This is good news for MySQL customers and for the open source community, and it reinforces the message that Oracle President Charles Phillips stated to us when they acquired InnoDB that they intended to renew the agreement.  And since InnoDB is GPL, freedom for users is guaranteed, no matter who owns the source code. 

The key guy to help drive this agreement from Oracle's side was Ken Jacobs.  Through a long series of meetings, some more challenging than others, Ken kept a cool head and continued to keep us all progressing …

The www.MySQL.com web site has always had a lot of traffic, but as MySQL has become more popular we've seen a steady increase in the last year.  In particular, our number of page views and downloads has increased dramatically since the release of MySQL 5.0.  We get over a million page views per day and generally over 50,000 downloads per day.  A lot of the traffic goes to our developer zone http://dev.mysql.com where we have lots of technical articles, interviews, documentation, forums and of course, software downloads.   Our reach and page views per user have steadily increased as …

Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media will be speaking at the upcoming MySQL Users Conference April 24-27 in Santa Clara.  Tim's been at the forefront of the open source revolution for as long as it's been called "open source", having helped bring the term into the lexicon after the historic Open Source Summit in April 1998.  More recently Tim has helped bring the notion of "Web 2.0" into mainstream discussion.

NerdTV has a great interview with in which Tim discusses how he got started in publishing, founding the first Perl conference, why licensing is a red herring and more. 

If you …

Matt Asay must be one tired camper!  I don't know how he manages to put together such a strong conference as the now twice-a-year OSBC gathering while holding down a regular day job at Alfresco!  While there are other conferences that target open source developers, OSBC is targeted to the business community: open source entrepreneurs, startups, innovators, investors.  Ok, he also allows lawyers and there's a smattering of end users.  But increasingly, OSBC is ground central for everyone who's anyone in the open source business.  For MySQL, it's a great way to connect with so many of our partners and also to meet with new companies who want to work with MySQL or understand how we've approached our business and what lessons we've learned along the way.  I'm always happy to "pay forward" by …