Oracle Corp, which supplies Yahoo Inc with database software, may lose some of that business to a little-known competing product -- the free MySQL database.
MySQL and others are starting to eat into the US$8.8 billion market for database software dominated by Oracle, International Business Machines Corp. and Microsoft Corp., users said. Yahoo, which uses MySQL to run the Yahoo Finance Web site, may replace some Oracle databases with MySQL, said Jeremy Zawodny, a computer engineer at the Internet company.
As the free Linux operating system gains acceptance among companies and government agencies, other open-source programs such as MySQL are making inroads as well. As MySQL improves, more companies are going to consider adopting it to store and retrieve information, Zawodny said.
"Linux has really hit the mainstream now and the same thing's going to happen in the database world," Zawodny said.
"It's just going to take a few years. That's when [database vendors] are really going to have to wake up."
This week, about 20,000 people gathered in San Francisco to learn more about open-source software at the LinuxWorld Conference, where Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison gave a keynote speech and IBM was a ``platinum sponsor.'' Open-source software programs, such as Linux and MySQL, are freely available on the Internet. Users can look at the underlying code, make changes and pass it on to others.
Oracle and IBM have embraced Linux in part because it offers a challenge to Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, whose Windows operating system runs more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers. All three companies pooh-pooh open- source databases.
"They're really very low-end products," Oracle Senior Vice President Andy Mendelsohn said at an investor conference this week. "I'm not too concerned about them being a viable competitor as yet."
Spokespeople from IBM and Microsoft said open-source databases aren't reliable and don't offer as many features as their own products. Both companies said they're keeping an eye on programs such as MySQL.
Like Linux, which was developed by a Finn named Linus Torvalds and posted on the Internet in 1991, MySQL is of Scandinavian heritage.
Two Swedes, David Axmark and Allan Larsson, and a Finn named Monty Widenius were working as computer consultants to Swedish companies and wanted a program to track customer buying patterns.
They couldn't find one they liked, so they wrote their own and released it in 1996.
They made the code available on the Internet, encouraging users to download it for free. They created a company, called MySQL AB, that would offer technical support for a fee.
With an expected 5 million euros (US$4.9 million) in sales this year, MySQL is a speck compared with Oracle, with sales of US$9.7 billion in the year ended May 31, or Microsoft, with sales of US$28 billion in the year to June 30. IBM had US$86 billion in sales last year.
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