One of the challenges open source companies have is that you serve two distinct markets: your customers as well as non-paying community users. Paradoxically, the non-paying users can be the most vocal and demanding. Matt Asay blogs about this as the "Open Source Community's Double Standard on MySQL." I had not thought about it quite the way Matt has framed the discussion, but his observations ring true to me. Pa One of the challenges open source companies have is that you serve two distinct markets: your customers as well as non-paying community users. Paradoxically, the non-paying users can be the most vocal and demanding. Matt Asay blogs about this as the “Open Source Community’s Double Standard on MySQL.” I had not thought about it quite the way Matt has framed the discussion, but his observations ring true to me. Part of the issue is that often discussions about the business of open source is seen as a “zero sum game” between community users and paying customers, meaning that in order for one group to benefit, the other group must lose. To me this polarizes the discussion in an unhealthy way. Our fundamental objective at MySQL is to grow both groups; that’s what makes MySQL a disruptive (and to me exciting) company. Our business depends on having more and more paying customers. And our momentum in the overall software industry depends on having a bigger community of users, even if they do not pay us. We know that many people start off by using MySQL for free and then at some point their needs become serious enough that they become paying customers. Our goal is to provide compelling reasons so that people will have a reason to buy something from us, while not alienating the users who have created the momentum and made MySQL popular. I remain optimistic that there is a way to continue to add value to our paying customers without hurting community adoption or growth. I believe that there are issues around scale-out for large users where they are willing to “pay more to get more” if we can save them time and effort around managing, monitoring, tuning and administering large numbers of servers. That’s been the idea behind the MySQL Enterprise offering and especially the Monitoring and Advisory service. It’s getting a good reaction from customers without taking anything away from non-paying users. As Savio points out, as we are successful in our commercial business, it enables us to continue to invest in the open source community.At this stage, I think we’re all exploring different approaches to building open source businesses and communities. But the good news is, if we make mistakes along the way, folks will tell us. Open Source