Wired about the Mysql AB deal

Wired reports about the Mysql AB in Sun Pays Up the Wazoo – $1 Billion – for MySQL. The article itself is not so interesting, it´s one of this terms and conditions articles, which were legion in the last few days. Nevertheless there is a comment in the article , which explains my antipathy in regard of the most surplus profession - analysts

"Less than 1 percent of MySQL users pay," wrote Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry. "Users are in the habit of getting free stuff and it's impossible to break the habit. . . We don't see Sun (being) able to monetize it."

They don´t see an opportunity even a blind man at midnight would recognize. At first: The tens of thousands of users, who run their blog on a mysql database on their debian server are commercially uninteresting, there are more interesting to build an opportunity. But there are users, who run their websites or their applications on mysql and need a supported database, but don´t want to spend a fortune for oracle. And these people want to pay. And at the size of the Mysql community 1 percent of users are a large group of customers.. It´s simple, these “research analys” simply don´t understand the model of open source, i doubt they understand the IT business as whole. Even when we are note able to monetize the Mysql at large, but with Mysql we have a powerful enabler to talk with companies about our products, about our servers. We get important even for a pure Linux on HP, Dell and IBM shop, as we own the M in LAMP now. And this is an important point to monetize on the 1bn $.