Mera SQL, dil mangey more!

The laws of prudent economics say you cannot run a business by giving away your core product free. The laws of the Open Source software business say you can.

In an earlier era when data base tools were part of the “trishul” of office PC applications (together with a word processor and spread sheet), desktop versions like DBase and enterprise editions of what were called relational data bases or RDBs, like Oracle and Ingres were all to be had — but at a price.

Then in 1996 a Swedish startup came up with the idea of creating a data base — or Structured Query Language (SQL), you ask questions of your data, any way you want — entirely in the Open Source arena.

What’s more, it was meant for people to use with Web applications — and it would be free.

MySQL was born and after 100 million downloads, it is one of the most popular Web-centric data base tools in use today.

Last month MySQL’s co-founder David Axmark was in Hyderabad. He was just in time to announce at the annual Sun Tech Days conference — the largest software ‘mela’ in India — that Sun had just completed the formalities to acquire MySQL and make it part of its own portfolio of Open offerings that include the run-anywhere programming environment Java and the operating system, Solaris.

Sun paid $ 1 billion for MySQL — which just proves, you can make a lot of money by creating an essentially free product (they do make their money by support and maintenance for companies).

As Mr. Axmark delivered his keynote, people worldwide continued to download MySQL for free at the rate of 5,000 a day from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/ — but this being India, the young whiz kids at SunTech had already given it a new name: Mera SQL, and like so many ‘desi’ Oliver Twists, they were saying “dil mangey more”!