Software Firm Is Open for Innovation

MYSQL chief Marten Mickos isn't afraid his rivals in the database software industry will ever overtake him. "Let them try," he says. "Our secret is in the way we operate our culture, and I'm convinced others cannot imitate that."

Mr. Mickos has about 12 million reasons to feel that way—the number of (mostly unpaid) programmers in MySQL's collaborative community. The company has been committed to "open-source" innovation since its founding in 1995. Like Linux and others, it shares its source code free of charge, giving programmers everywhere permission to debug, add capabilities or otherwise modify the product before redistributing it. (The company makes money by selling commercial licenses and offering support and services.)

Mr. Mickos became senior vice president of Sun Microsystems Inc.'s database group earlier this year when Sun acquired MySQL for $1 billion. In a recent interview, he shared his ideas about why MySQL's Internet-age version of a barn raising produces superior innovation and what motivates all those developers. He spoke with Josh Hyatt, contributing editor of MIT Sloan Management Review, for the Business Insight Journal Report.

BUSINESS INSIGHT: What would cause a company like MySQL to make the radical move of open sourcing its product? Does a business just have to be born with that tendency toward transparency?

MR. MICKOS: Interestingly, the whole company was started by the founders writing the product code themselves. They were thinking of a closed-source product. Then one of the founders saw a presentation about open source and convinced the others that this was the way the world was going to go. That was in the first year, 1995.

BUSINESS INSIGHT: Did opening the source code to everybody generate outside contributions right away?

MR. MICKOS: You need a good user base before you start getting contributions. Sometime in the late 1990s, people sent in new features or patches and other stuff. Sometimes they were paying customers who paid to have features added. There is no one model of innovation that fits everything. So we get contributions from the world, and we innovate in-house, and we pay others to contribute to our product. We also have customers who pay us to create the feature they are looking for.

BUSINESS INSIGHT: How do you prevent competitors from making contributions designed to do damage?

MR. MICKOS: Nobody has ever tried. But of course we need to be protected against the risk of that anyway. The fact that you send us some code doesn't mean that it goes into the product. We put it through a quality review. We test it, we make sure the documentation is there and that coding standards are right and that it fits our road map.

BUSINESS INSIGHT: Given that you might reject the work that they've done for free, how do you keep those external innovators motivated?

MR. MICKOS: We sometimes use money. There's a part of our product called the JBDC driver, a sizable piece of code, and a guy in the open-source community had developed it. Everybody loved it. We went to him and said, "Hey, would you like to join us as an employee and sell your code to us?" He made money on it. But for something small like a bug fix or a tweak here or there, we know what to do because we understand the motivation of the contributors.

BUSINESS INSIGHT: And what is their motivation, as far as you can tell?

MR. MICKOS: Those who contribute to us are as selfish as anybody else. There's rarely any charitable aspect of this. Their No. 1 reason is that they are contributing so that they will get, in return, a better functioning product. They are looking after their own business interests. No. 2, and almost equally important, is their desire to build a reputation for themselves. We will say publicly what they have done. So they get great recognition for being smart engineers and brilliant programmers. That gives them better job offers and it gives them a feeling of usefulness in the world. They get a lot of emotional and practical benefits.

BUSINESS INSIGHT: How do you tell the world about an outsider's contribution?

MR. MICKOS: In the product, they will be on a list of contributors. And we'll even write a blog posting or an article about them. Every year we announce the Community Person of the Year award.

BUSINESS INSIGHT: Is there any way to organize a company for innovation? Build it into the structure of a business?

MR. MICKOS: We don't have an innovation team or group. Innovation is so central to us that everybody does it. Our innovations are not meeting-centric. We prefer trial and error, getting scrutiny and commentary from everyone.

BUSINESS INSIGHT: Does innovation always have to be informal? Is that the only way it can happen?

MR. MICKOS: I think so. I think that innovation happens in encounters when you encounter other people and also when you step over some boundary and you combine ideas that haven't been combined before. The original innovation moment always has the aspect of being chaotic.

BUSINESS INSIGHT: Couldn't a potential competitor use your code as a starting point to get into the business—and crush you?

MR. MICKOS: Even if someone studied us in tiny detail, I don't think they could really match us. We've shown them our code, and nobody has been able to measure up against what we have.

BUSINESS INSIGHT: Why is that?

MR. MICKOS: Even if I showed you my DNA, you wouldn't know how to become me.