Marten Mickos was not eager to join the upstart database company run by his friends and former classmates.
“I would always say to them: 'Why don't you guys get real jobs?'” he recalls.
Creating an open-source database seemed almost silly to him then. After all, he told his friends, the world is full of databases.
That was in 1995.
“Then I joined a database company myself and said, 'Hey, you haven't got a chance. We will take down Oracle. We have funding, we have a business, we have more developers.'”
But by 1997, he found himself sending an email to David Axmark and Monty Widenius, the founders of MySQL, saying, 'Hey, guys, you're getting some traction!'”
They saved the email.
