Six months after Sun purchased MySQL, Tim O'Reilly interviews Monty Widenius and Brian Aker, the founder and Director of Technology, respectively, of MySQL. In this conversation from the 2008 O'Reilly Open Source Convention, they discuss the integration of MySQL's open source culture into Sun, new projects they are working on, the effects the major tech companies have on open source, and philanthropic support of open causes.
One of the biggest surprises that came from integrating MySQL into Sun is how quickly and widely MySQL's open culture spread throughout the much larger Sun. MySQL had only a few hundred employees compared to Sun's tens of thousands, but it was a largely virtual company and operated in public through mailing lists, chat, and other visible sources. Adapting these to Sun has introduced these practices to a large number of employees who were used to releasing finished, proprietary products.
Monty Widenius is the main author of the original version of the open-source MySQL database and a founding member of the MySQL AB company. After studying at the Helsinki University of Technology, Widenius started working for Tapio Laakso Oy in 1981. In 1985 he founded TCX DataKonsult AB (a Swedish data warehousing company) with Allan Larsson. In 1995 he began writing the first version of the MySQL database with David Axmark, released in 1996. He is the co-author of the MySQL Reference Manual, published by O'Reilly in June 2002; and in 2003 he was awarded the Finnish Software Entrepreneur of The Year prize. Until MySQL AB's sale to Sun Microsystems in January 2008, he was the chief technical officer of MySQL AB and still one of the primary forces behind the ongoing development of MySQL.
Brian Aker is the Director of Technology for MySQL. At MySQL he helps set direction for technology and looks for opportunies to harness and shape the MySQL database for efforts in Web, OEM, and Telephony. In his copious amounts of free time he works on Apache and Perl modules, and hacks on the Asterisk Telephony System (hence never has a working home phone number). In the past, he has been involved with projects for the Army Engineer Corps, The Virtual Hospital, Splunk, and Slashdot. He lives in Seattle with his dog Rosalynd.
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