Mårten Mickos
CEO, MySQL AB
The billion-dollar exit that made open core a category
Rating
80Impact score
Domains
DatabasesOpen source businessSecurity
Scouting report
Ran MySQL AB from 2001 and sold it to Sun in 2008 for about a billion dollars, the most anyone had paid for an open source company. MySQL was the M in LAMP, so the deal proved a freely licensed database with a paid support tier could be worth as much as a proprietary one. He later ran Eucalyptus and HackerOne.
Curator’s note
The exit every open source founder cited for the following decade.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Mårten Mickos by Andrew Smart of AC Cooper, licensed CC BY 3.0 us.
Sources
- 01Mårten Mickos en.wikipedia.org
- 02MySQL AB en.wikipedia.org