MySQL celebrated its 10th anniversary this week, and a co-founder acknowledged that taking the company public is likely at some juncture.Co-founder David Axmark, interviewed at the MySQL Users Conference 2005 in Santa Clara Wednesday, said the company does have venture capitalist investors who would like to exit at some point, thus making an initial public offering likely. But no decision has been finalized and no timeframe set. “That’s up to our investors to decide,” Axmark said.Reflecting on the evolution of MySQL, which began in Scandinavia in 1995, Axmark said the company’s database was offered under a partial open source license in 1996 and a full, GPL-based license in 2000. Asked why the company initially opted for an open source strategy, Axmark said, “Why not?” “We had nothing to lose. We had a couple of customers we would have had anyway,” Axmark said. He added that those involved in the venture already were using open source technologies such as Linux and emacs. Now, the company boasts 50,000 downloads of its software per day and revenues of $20 million last year, with revenues doubling every year. But Axmark does not see open source software generating the kind of billion-dollar earnings sheets that proprietary commercial companies have seen. “The customer gets to keep the biggest part of the pie,” through cost savings, Axmark said. Open source will dominate software commodities but not specialized systems such as complex ERP applications, Axmark said. Such a system has a small number of users and a great deal of code, making it less conducive to open source, he said. Axmark is an outspoken opponent of software patents, even applying “No Patents” stickers to his laptop. It is just too hard to determine whether something being done in software already exists, he said. Also at the show, Marten Mickos, MySQL CEO touted open source, MySQL showed off some new clustering technology, and Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann spoke out against software patents and Microsoft. — By Paul Krill, reporting from the MySQL Users Conference 2005 event. Databases