MySQL AB was a

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

software company founded in 1995. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, Sun was in turn acquired by

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

in 2010. MySQL AB is the creator of

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

, a relational database management system, as well as related products such as MySQL Cluster. The company was dually headquartered in

Uppsala Uppsala (, or all ending in , ; archaically spelled ''Upsala'') is the county seat of Uppsala County and the List of urban areas in Sweden by population, fourth-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. It had 177,074 inha ...

, Sweden, and Cupertino,

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...

, with offices in other countries ( France (Paris), Germany (Munich), Ireland (Dublin), Italy (Milan), and Japan (Tokyo)). MySQL AB had 400 employees in 25 countries, and Open-source model companies. Around 70% of the employees were remote workers. Together with

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

, Apache, and

PHP PHP is a General-purpose programming language, general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementati ...

, the MySQL Server forms one of the building blocks of the LAMP technology stack. The company claimed over 5 million MySQL installations and over 10 million product downloads in 2004.

Revenue

MySQL AB representatives are commonly cited as champions of what they claim to be a "second generation" of open source companies. 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" of companies, such as MySQL AB and Trolltech, from earlier "open source"

business model A business model describes how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value,''Business Model Generation'', Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, and 470 practitioners from 45 countries, self-published, 2010 in economic, soc ...

s is dual licensing — the software is supplied under an open source license, but traditional software licences are also sold by the company that owns the software. As an example, 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, such as inclusion of MySQL AB technology in a closed source product. Other sources of revenue for MySQL AB were providing support and consulting, as well as training and certification for MySQL Server. Together with some additional services, MySQL also provided a subscription-based product called

MySQL Enterprise MySQL Enterprise is a subscription-based service produced by Oracle Corporation and targeted toward the commercial market. Oracle's official support, training and certification focus on MySQL Enterprise. MySQL Enterprise contains * MySQL Enterpr ...

, which is also resold by other companies such as Dell, HP, and

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the l ...

History

* 1995 – Company founded by Michael Widenius, David Axmark, and Allan Larsson * 2001 – Mårten Mickos elected CEO * 2001 – First round financing by Scandinavian venture capitalists * 2003 – Second round financing by a group of investors headed by Benchmark Capital * 2003 – Partnership agreement concluded with SAP SE, acquiring the full commercial rights to MaxDB * 2003 – Acquired Alzato, a subsidiary of

Ericsson (lit. "Telephone Stock Company of LM Ericsson"), commonly known as Ericsson, is a Sweden, Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm. The company sells infrastructure, software, and services in ...

* In February 2005 the MySQL Network subscription service was announced (later called MySQL Enterprise). A third round of about $18.5 million financing led by Institutional Venture Partners, including Intel Capital, Red Hat, SAP Ventures, and others was disclosed in February 2006. On 16 January 2008, MySQL AB announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems for approximately $1 billion. The acquisition completed on 26 February 2008.

then acquired Sun in 2010.

References

External links

Company home pagePlanetMySQL
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mysql Ab Software companies of Sweden Free software companies Sun Microsystems acquisitions Companies based in Uppsala County Uppsala Software companies established in 1995 1995 establishments in Sweden 2008 mergers and acquisitions