MySQL AB

MySQL AB was a software company that was founded in 1995. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008; Sun was in turn acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010. MySQL AB is the creator of MySQL, a relational database management system, as well as related products such as MySQL Cluster. The company was dually headquartered in Uppsala, Sweden and Cupertino, California with offices in other countries (France (Paris), Germany (Munich), Ireland (Dublin), Italy (Milan); and Japan (Tokyo)). With around 400 employees in 25 countries, MySQL AB was one of the largest open source companies. Around 70% of the employees worked for MySQL from their home offices.

Together with Linux, Apache, and PHP, the MySQL Server forms one of the building blocks of the LAMP technology stack. The company claimed over 5 million MySQL installations and over 10 million product downloads in 2004.

MySQL AB representatives are commonly cited as champions of what they claim to be a "second generation" of open source companies. The revenues of both first and second generation open source companies usually derive from selling support, consulting services, and training for their products. What generally distinguishes this "second generation" of companies, such as MySQL AB and Trolltech, from earlier "open source" business models is dual licensing — the software is supplied under an open source license, but traditional software licences are also sold by the company that owns the software. As an example, MySQL AB makes MySQL available under the GPL at no charge, but sells it under other more traditional licenses to clients who do not find the GPL to be ideal for their purposes, such as inclusion of MySQL AB technology in a closed source product.