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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

The pattern you are missing is that Oracle, formerly Sun, paid Monty a billion dollars for MySQL, which he happily accepted. And let's not forget that MySQL was ALWAYS dual-licensed.

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Sun didn't become Oracle, Oracle purchased Sun, so it wasn't Oracle who paid Monty. When Monty sold MySQL to Sun he believed them to be a good fit for the project, and they would keep it going in the spirit he hoped for. He could never have foreseen it would be sold to Oracle.

And yes, it has always been dual-licensed, but as Monty himself says: "The basic idea for our dual-licensing was this: if you bought a license then we waived the GPL restriction that you have to redistribute your code as GPL. You could change, modify, extend, distribute, and redistribute the copy in any way you wanted (but of course not change the license of the MySQL code). The license was for any version and usage of MySQL, for now and forever." [1]

[1] http://monty-says.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/thoughts-about-dual...

The writing was on the wall for Sun at the time. Maybe Monty couldn't have predicted it would be Oracle specifically, but he should certainly have seen that the continuity of Sun's operation could not be relied upon.

You should really consider that at no time would Monty himself have received a wire transfer for a billion dollars. This "Monty got a billion dollars, what more does he want?!" thing is repeated all the time, but it's just not true. The MySQL companies were bought by Sun for a billion dollars, but Monty did not own 100% of the companies (or even close) -- MySQL was substantially owned by a bunch of VC companies and other executives, all of which got the lion's share of the money.

Since tax records in Finland are public, you can see how much Monty made from this acquisition (approximately) here:

http://www.iltasanomat.fi/kotimaa/art-1288338449921.html

(Ulf Michael Widenius income for 2008, ~16.8M EUR)

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