"I am very passionate about open source. And I do believe that it is a superior method. But at the same time, I must be pragmatic. So when they say being dogmatic is very important for the Free Software Foundation -- well, they should be. That's what we respect them for. But running a business is not about dogma," said MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos.

For an executive who had just had his company bought for a cool billion a few months ago and was on the eve of announcing a major update to his business' flagship database program, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now Sun Microsystems' senior vice president for databases, didn't look comfortable.

"...Marten Mickos has just acknowledge that I understood the slide quite correctly, and they will indeed develop new features in MySQL Enterprise (in 6.0), without making them available in MySQL Community. Hmm!"

MySQL leader Marten Mickos tries to calm Linux leaders' fears of MySQL abandoning the Linux market, writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols.

Mickos [Mårten] was recruited to lead open-source database provider MySQL AB in 2001 by chief technology officer and co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius, a college classmate. Since then, the MySQL database has become one of the most popular open-source technologies around, used by many of the biggest Web 2.0 sites.

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."

I've been thinking about this statement from Sun/MySQL's Marten Mickos: "There's a difference between organizations that have more time than money and organizations that have more money than time."

Wow, I wasn't expecting this one: Sun is buying MySQL: "the biggest news of the day is... we're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you're an industry insider, you'll know what that means - we're acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world's most popular open source database."

The Sun faithful who attended the CommunityOne Conference this morning may not have noticed, but Sun and its MySQL executives were very clear about Sun's open-source strategy going forward, despite news reports that seem to have missed the nuances: The core will always be 100 percent open source. The periphery...will not. Or might not. It depends.