(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. 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 commercial companies who seek to derive revenues from selling traditional software licenses.
As an example: MySQL AB make MySQL available under the
GPL at no charge but sell 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 are providing support and consulting as well as training and certification for MySQL Server. Together with some additional services MySQL also provide this as a subscription based product called MySQL Network which is also resold by other companies like
Dell ,
HP , and
Novell .
