Can you develop a business model that works for the community and for paying customers? It’s interesting to see the response to this week’s announcement of MySQL’s new Query Analyzer (part of the subscription offering) and the forthcoming 5.1 release of the server. There’s been a lot of random speculation about MySQL’s business model and whether it fits with Sun’s model. So lets recap…The new MySQL Query Analyzer has been in development for more than a year and helps customers find peformance bottlenecks. In many ways, MySQL is sometimes a “black box” and when something is slow it’s tough to know why or even where to look. The Query Analyzer was designed to enable developers and DBAs to pinpoint the source of performance bottlenecks.Even the MySQL web team has been able to find and fix problems faster using the Query Analyzer, and they are pretty sharp folks with direct access to our developers and consultants. What the MySQL Query Analyzer does is give laser focus so busy DBA and developers concentrate their efforts where it will have the most payoff. There have been similar benefits reported from customers like Clickability where they were able to cut the time of some queries by 48% on some pretty complex systems. So back to the business model… The MySQL server has always been open source and we re-affirmed that many times over the years. To make money, we provide additional value with add-on tools like Query Analyzer and Enterprise Monitor that are part of our commecial subscription offering. Yes, you can run MySQL in production without these capabilities and many have done so for years. But for companies that are running business critical apps where support and performance matters, they can find and fix problems faster and more easily by buying a subscription. As Marten likes to say there are some users who will spend time to save money (using the community edition) and other users who will spend money to save time (by buying a subscription.) We try to strike a balance here, but recognize its up to our users to decide in which category they fall. It’s not about trying to make money from our community of users or just trying to sell support. It’s about identifying people for whom the added value is worthwhile. Not surprisingly, that’s a key role in the marketing organization of an open source software company.We love all our users equally, but as Matt Asay has noted, IT organizations are pragmatic. They’ll use open source to save money in a down economy, but they won’t pay unless there’s a compelling reason. That’s consistent with what I have observed in meetings with CIOs and CTOs over the last year. In fact, they prefer that their open source vendors have a sustainable business model. The MySQL business model is about providing customers that compelling added value. And its a model that I believe is applicable across many areas of open source. In fact, here’s how I would state the model works at Sun: -Sun provides high quality open source software used by millions of developers around the world (for those who want to save money) -Sun sells software add-ons that provide additional capabilities to make it easier to scale (for those with business critical applications) -Sun sell systems (servers and storage) that run open source extremely well (for those who want the best scalability and performance)What do you think? Does this business model make sense? Open Source