Red Hat invested venture capital for MySQL [LWN.net]

Red Hat invested venture capital for MySQL

Posted Oct 1, 2010 8:38 UTC (Fri) by mjw (subscriber, #16740)
In reply to: IBM/TurboHercules can be resolved with license; no need for abolition by gnufreex
Parent article: Red Hat Responds to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Request for Guidance on Bilski

> Red Hat is one of biggest reasons for success of FLOSS in general. They and Cygnus put it on the map. I would even argue that MySQL owes lots of it's success to Red Hat. If MySQL wasn't in RHEL, it would be stillborn.

And Red Hat was one of the venture capital investors providing seed funding for MySQL AB: http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/generate-article.php...

to post comments

No, Red Hat did not provide "seed funding for MySQL AB"

Posted Oct 1, 2010 8:44 UTC (Fri) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link]

And Red Hat was one of the venture capital investors providing seed funding for MySQL AB

As a former MySQL AB shareholder, I know that this is wrong. If you look at the press release you linked to, it's from 2006. MySQL AB was founded and received its seed investments in 2001 (the year I became involved as well). It received some more funding that year as well as in 2002 from European investors. Then in 2003, Benchmark Capital (knowing for funding eBay, Red Hat, Twitter), Index Ventures (known for funding Skype), SAP's corporate venture capital group and others came in. Red Hat came in three years after those, five years after the seed round.

Red Hat invested venture capital for MySQL

Posted Oct 1, 2010 8:49 UTC (Fri) by gnufreex (guest, #70396) [Link] (10 responses)

Thank you. I knew that but forgot to mention.

But mentioning that wouldn't help anyways, Florian will invent (and maybe patent) some crazy explanation why Red Hat's money is parasitic and why MySQL AB would be better off without it. That happens when you feed the tr.. I mean lobbyist.

Red Hat invested venture capital for MySQL

Posted Oct 1, 2010 8:53 UTC (Fri) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link]

Prior to your thanking him for this, I had already posted a correction. Red Hat came in very late (and owned a tiny share of the company), five years after the seed round. I doubt MySQL ever even spent one cent of Red Hat's money because it didn't have any significant burn rate at the time and was sold shortly thereafter.

Red Hat invested venture capital for MySQL

Posted Oct 1, 2010 9:01 UTC (Fri) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link] (8 responses)

> But mentioning that wouldn't help anyways, Florian will invent (and maybe patent) some crazy explanation why Red Hat's money is parasitic and why MySQL AB would be better off without it. That happens when you feed the tr.. I mean lobbyist.

Ha ha. But yes, you are right as you can see above. The venture capital Red Hat injected into the MySQL AB company wasn't "seed capital", so obviously it is just more proof of the parasitic nature of Red Hat :) How dare they try to take a chance and invest in innovative companies and business methods! Well, it was worth a try to inject some facts into the discussion.

Red Hat invested venture capital for MySQL

Posted Oct 1, 2010 9:06 UTC (Fri) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link] (7 responses)

@mjw It's disappointing to see that you react so unreasonably to my clarification. It was *you* who said that Red Hat was a seed investor. You could have phrased it more broadly, then I wouldn't have had to correct it. It certainly does make a major difference whether a company places a seed investment in something when the risk is highest or comes in when the company is already in great shape and ends up being sold not much later.

Obviously it's not "parasitic" to invest money at any stage. It's just that coming in at that stage isn't when you can claim to be a co-creator of the product.

Red Hat invested venture capital for MySQL

Posted Oct 1, 2010 9:24 UTC (Fri) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link] (6 responses)

Dude lighten up. We are just making fun of your impulsive desire to discredit Red Hat at every possibility you see. Don't focus on such small details like a different interpretation of the word "seed capital" to score some point. The point was just that they do invest in things like MySQL through various ways.

There are just many different ways Free Software companies like Red Hat invest and innovate in communities, projects, projects and their customers. They just like doing that by providing high value at lower costs to their customers by being a catalyst and amplifier of the free software ecosystem. They even invested in you by paying you to play lobbyist at a time when that did make sense. So yes, sometimes Red Hat makes mistakes, sometimes they invest time, money and resources in things that turn out not to benefit them and the community as much as we hope. But that is just what you do when you take risks and try to innovate and change an industry.

Red Hat invested venture capital for MySQL

Posted Oct 1, 2010 11:38 UTC (Fri) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link] (5 responses)

There is no "different interpretation of the word 'seed capital'".

You said a wrong thing -- why can't you admit it? Seed capital is clearly defined and not by any stretch of the imagination would a company founded in 2001, sold in 2008, be at the "seed" stage in 2006.

Red Hat invested venture capital for MySQL

Posted Oct 1, 2010 12:17 UTC (Fri) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link] (4 responses)

> There is no "different interpretation of the word 'seed capital'".

Well, clearly there was, since you meant something different by it than I did.

> You said a wrong thing -- why can't you admit it? Seed capital is clearly defined and not by any stretch of the imagination would a company founded in 2001, sold in 2008, be at the "seed" stage in 2006.

Relax. You "won" your point. Feel free to just read that sentence without the word seed in there. So "Red Hat was one of the venture capital investors providing funding for MySQL AB". There fixed. The point was just a little addition to what others had said. Red Hat invested through various means to help make MySQL a success.

But this is precisely why we are making a little fun of you. You seem to want to win these grammatical/spelling error points over a wrongly used word in a sentence. While missing the bigger discussion completely.

Red Hat invested venture capital for MySQL

Posted Oct 1, 2010 12:23 UTC (Fri) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link] (3 responses)

The fact that you meant something different by "seed capital" is irrelevant. You can mean what you want and that doesn't automatically mean that there are different definitions by even remotely reasonable standards. Better look up Wikipedia (deep link leads to relevant paragraph) or any other source.

I said before that seed makes all the difference here. When we talk about creating innovation, the critical stage is early, not shortly before trade sale or IPO.

Contrary to what you claim, I'm not missing the bigger discussion. We're having one big discussion here, and in some subthreads, individual aspects such as Red Hat's investment in MySQL get discussed.

Are you a Red Hat employee by any chance? I believe you (unless I confuse you for another nickname) identified yourself as one in some other thread. It would have been nice to do so in this context in case you are.

Red Hat invested venture capital for MySQL

Posted Oct 1, 2010 12:39 UTC (Fri) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link] (2 responses)

> Contrary to what you claim, I'm not missing the bigger discussion.

Lets disagree, I think this whole discussion shows you are missing why you are wrong in the bigger discussion.

> I believe you (unless I confuse you for another nickname) identified yourself as one in some other thread. It would have been nice to do so in this context in case you are.

Dude, you are repeating yourself. Try to relax and not relive every discussion again and again. Yes, we discussed this already. You fail to identify who funds you and I was open about who funds what work I do:
http://lwn.net/Articles/402409/

Red Hat invested venture capital for MySQL

Posted Oct 5, 2010 22:38 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

It's been four days and Florian doesn't seem to have followed up to this post. Strange that.

Red Hat invested venture capital for MySQL

Posted Oct 6, 2010 3:56 UTC (Wed) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link]

During those days there's been a lot of interest in the Android situation (firstly Microsoft's announcement of infringement action against Motorola, then also Oracle's reply to Google's suit) and I had to answer press questions and I wanted to analyze the overall situation on my blog, which was a lot of work (looking at all patents-in-suit from all three Android cases).

I'll try to answer questions to the extent they bring up new points that should be discussed. But I can't always do it as quickly as I'd like to.