Technology Trumps Dogma, And Other Open Source Insights

Marten Mickos is one of the most respected leaders in open source. Here's why.

A few weeks back I asked Marten Mickos (@martenmickos), CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, to comment on the changing face of open source. He did, and with the usual Mickos style. Unfortunately, a whole lot of great commentary had to be cut for space reasons.

Given the brilliant insights Mickos offered, I wanted to share his comments in their entirety here. Mickos helped make MySQL arguably the most popular database on the planet, and is trying to achieve similar success with an open source cloud offering.

With a string of successes—and failures—under his belt, Mickos had multiple pearls of open source wisdom to share. For instance while open-source developers have long eschewed corporate influence on open-source projects, Mickos starts by reminds us that money is critical for funding development, not to mention marketing, documentation, etc. The myth of a peace-loving, cashless open source existence is just that: a myth.