Marc Fleury, JBoss founder, critical of Save MySQL campaign

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".

Fleury feels there is a danger that companies wishing to acquire open source companies will find the process "dicey and dangerous" as the prospect of possible intervention from regulators would overshadow the transactions; a worry that The H noted being expressed by entrepreneurs in November in the feature "The MySQL question - free or free-market?". However, Fleury's public comments appear to be badly timed, as it is reported that the deal will be approved by the European Commission this week. Widenius's campaign has now moved on to focus on Russia and China's competition regulators.

(djwm)