Former MySQL boss Marten Mickos says there's still "more to develop and more territory to conquer", and predicts Microsoft will "become one of the biggest friends of open source".

"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.

News that MySQL was to bring out a closed-source add on has provoked a storm of protest across the Internet. Here is an interview with Marten Mickos trying to explain what is going on

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.

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.

Marten Mickos – the former MySQL chief executive who now heads build-you-own-cloud outfit Eucalyptus Systems – has defended the Eucalyptus platform against recent criticism of both its "open core" model and its ability to scale beyond a relatively small number of servers.

Can Marten Mickos capture open source lightning in a bottle — twice? He previously built MySQL into an estimated $100 million open source database company that Sun ultimately acquired for $1 billion. Now, Mickos is stepping into the CEO role at Eucalyptus Systems, the open-source cloud platform provider.

You might know that beginning with MySQL 5.1.24, support for the NDBCLUSTER storage engine was removed from the standard MySQL server binaries built by MySQL. Therefore, here I'm using MySQL Cluster edition instead of MySQL Community edition.