Larry Ellison tried waving his American Express card at MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, but Mickos turned down his offer for the company.
So Ellison tried to buy MySQL, just as his Oracle Corporation has purchased InnoDB and Sleepycat. That much was disclosed by Mickos at the recent Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, CNet reported. “We will be part of a larger company, but it will be called MySQL,” Mickos said.
But when did Ellison make his offer for MySQL? Mickos won’t say, which is too bad because knowing that would provide some context for Oracle’s Sleepycat and InnoDB deals. The InnoDB purchase happened in October 2005, and the Sleepycat buy happened on Valentine’s Day earlier this week.
Mickos sees his MySQL firm, built around the open source MySQL database product, as one that needs its independence. Outside money, from venture capital firms and from other tech companies like Intel and Red Hat, have helped it maintain its independence. The most recent financing round added $18.5 million to MySQL’s coffers.
MySQL has a broad following among some of the most prominent names on the Internet. Yahoo, Craigslist, and Wikipedia all use MySQL to power their online applications. Oracle could make a greater play for the open source application server market, should rumors of an Oracle acquisition of JBoss prove correct.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
