Marc Fleury, founder and former head of JBoss, has criticised Monty Widenius’s “Save MySQL” campaign saying it makes open source acquisitions “dicey and dangerous”. His comments appear in a posting on his Maison Fleury blog.
Fleury is the creator of the open source JBoss application server and he went on to sell JBoss and the associated company to Red Hat where it is now a core element of Red Hat’s strategy. According to Fleury, JBoss now brings in over $100M a year for Red Hat. Fleury’s criticism of Widenius’s strategy to present public petitions to competition regulators in Europe, Russia and China, in an effort to see MySQL saved from the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems, refers to the previous sale of MySQL Lab to Sun. Saying “IT WAS SOLD! IT’S OVER! At least for the corporate part”, Fleury suggests that Widenius’s campaign will “only hurt Sun and Sun employees…”
