MySQL AB

MySQL AB (founded 1995) is dual headquartered in Uppsala, Sweden and Cupertino, California, USA. The company is the creator and owner of MySQL, a relational database management system.

With over 360 employees in over 25 countries (figures from February 2007), MySQL AB is one of the largest open source companies worldwide.

Together with Linux, Apache and PHP/Perl/Python, MySQL forms one of the building blocks of the LAMP technology stack. The company claims a user base of over 5 million MySQL installations worldwide, and over 10 million product downloads in 2004.

MySQL AB representatives are commonly cited as "champions" of what they claim to be a "second generation" of open source companies.^{[citation needed]} The revenues of both first and second generation open source companies usually derive from selling support, consulting services and training for their products.

What generally distinguishes this "second generation" consisting of companies like MySQL AB and Trolltech from earlier "open source" business models is dual licensing: while the software may be made available under the provisions of some open source license, the software is in fact owned by the for-profit companies who seek to derive revenues from selling traditional software licenses.

For instance, MySQL AB makes MySQL available under the GPL at no charge, but sells it under other "more traditional" licenses to clients who do not find the GPL to be ideal for their purposes (e.g. - inclusion of MySQL AB technology in a closed-source product).

Other sources of revenue for MySQL AB are providing support and consulting as well as training and certification for the MySQL Server. Together with some additional services, MySQL also provides this as a subscription-based product offering named MySQL Network, which is also resold by other companies like Dell, HP and Novell.

• 1995 Company founded by Michael Widenius, David Axmark and Allan Larsson
• 2001 Mårten Mickos elected CEO
• 2001 First-round financing by Scandinavian VCs
• 2003 Second-round financing by a group of investors headed by Benchmark Capital
• 2003 Partnership agreement concluded with SAP, acquiring the full commercial rights to MaxDB
• 2003 Acquired Alzato, a subsidiary of Ericsson
• 2005 MySQL Network subscription service launched
• 2006 Third-round financing by Intel Capital, Red Hat, SAP Ventures, and others

• Company home page
• MySQL Network
• MySQL's possibly specious claim to a protocol copyright
• Discussion of uncopyrightable material at BitLaw

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