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Interview with MySQL’s Marten Mickos in WSJ

Interesting interview with Marten Mickos in the Wall Street Journal today. I think he describes the overall environment really well, although I don’t quite agree that the innovation spirit is all through MySQL. That depends on where the people come from and their own interests, as well as the drivers of their department.

Also, the number of developers is not really 12M. The 12M people could actually be a huge QA department, and used to be exactly that, but they aren’t now. This because new code now goes into the Enterprise branch, and first gets tested by the few thousand Enterprise customers, before being let loose on the wider community (the 12M). I’m sure the Enterprise customers are really pleased about this (ask Mark Callaghan)… it’s completely upside down. AKA utterly borked.

Thanks to James McPherson for that link.

On the note of business models, see this: What could Open Office do with a business model?.

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