Impackt 08 — Interview with Lenz Grimmer

Lenz Grimmer is a member of the Community Relations team at MySQL AB. He lives in Hamburg, Germany and has worked for MySQL since April, 2002. Before joining the Community Relations team in December 2005, he was a member of the Release Engineering team that is in charge of creating the official release builds of the MySQL server. Prior to working for MySQL, Lenz was an engineer in the distribution development team of SuSE Linux in Nuremberg for four years. His first work experiences with LAMP environments date back to 1995, when he took his first job as a systems administrator and web developer for a small web company. He has a degree in Computer Science and has been involved in Linux and Open Source since 1994. In his spare time, Lenz enjoys playing with his daughter Lena and spending time in the garden.

Lenz Grimmer: Thanks a lot for giving me the opportunity to answer your questions! Please note that my answers reflect my personal opinion and are not official statements from Sun/MySQL.

Packt Publishing: For MySQL AB, the acquisition by Sun is probably one of the biggest events in its history! How will MySQL employees be affected by this?

Lenz Grimmer: Well, it certainly was a big event! But for most employees, not much will change for the foreseeable future - Sun has aquired us particularly because we are good and effective in what we do. They want to make sure we can continue with that, so we will be able to maintain most of our established structures and procedures for now. We will continue to be able to work from home, and we still will have the same colleagues and team leads. Of course, we will soon all have Sun Employee IDs and Email addresses. But being able to tap into Sun's resources will allow us to grow and expand into many areas that we may have not been able to reach by ourselves!

PP: $1 billion seems like a lot to pay for an open source company. Does this mean Sun is planning to come up with an upgraded, commercial version of MySQL in order to recover the cost?

LG: The MySQL Server will remain freely available under the GPL. While I can't comment on future plans (as I have no insight), I expect that there will be new additional service offerings like our current MySQL Enterprise subscription offering, which will be available only for a fee. As Sun is actively working on becoming more Open Source friendly, I can't really imagine that they would go into the opposite direction with the MySQL Server by making it less Open Source and more commerical.

PP: How will this acquisition benefit MySQL in the long term?

LG: It's probably too early to make any predictions, but I have high hopes and expectations. The additional support and resources from Sun will allow us to improve MySQL in many different areas. On the technical side, I expect to see many improvements when it comes to running MySQL on large systems with many CPUs and lots of memory. MySQL will most likely run even better on Solaris than it does today, but without compromising the support of any other platform like Linux, Mac OS X or Windows. In fact, these platforms will certainly also benefit from any optimizations we will make. - From a community viewpoint, I hope that we will be able to further open up our development processes, to facilitate and encourage even more active participation from the community with our developers. We are working on expanding the possibilities for community involvement and can learn a lot from the other Sun OSS projects like OpenOffice or OpenSolaris here. Finally, customers will be able enjoy the additional support and services that only a large organization like Sun can provide. Sun will allow us to expand and reach into countries and customers that we were not able to get into before.

PP: Sun has a reputation for promoting Open Source, which bodes well for MySQL. However, Sun has also been a Global Partner with Oracle, which is a competitor to you. Do you think this will affect the development of MySQL in the long term?

LG: MySQL has never considered Oracle to be a competitor. They both serve completely different markets - MySQL fills a niche that Oracle has not considered serving so far. So in a way these products complement each other. In fact, MySQL and Oracle have a joint development agreement regarding the InnoDB storage engine, they will profit from any improvements that will be made to the MySQL Server as well. So I don't expect that the development of MySQL will change or be affected, as Oracle and MySQL have been partners before. And Sun is certainly not interested in changing anything - they want to offer more choice to the customer and provide him with the right solution for his needs.

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