interview: Marten Mickos (MySQL)

Posted on | August 25, 2006 | No Comments

Guy Kawasaki continues his stream of great interviews (see here and here), this time featuring Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB. MySQL AB is the company behind open source database-management-system MySQL, which is successfully powering applications at Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, YouTube or Second Life. I found it – positively! – interesting how Mickos recognizes free-riding open-source users as MySQL’s strongest evangelists:

At MySQL we LOVE users who never pay us money. They are our evangelists. No marketing could do for us what a passionate MySQL user does when he tells his friends and colleagues about MySQL. Our success is based on having millions of evangelists around the world. Of course, they also help us develop the product and fix bugs. And the few times they say they hate MySQL, that helps us too because complaints usually contain some good suggestion for improvement.

 

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