Former MySQL boss Marten Mickos says there's still "more to develop and more territory to conquer", and predicts Microsoft will "become one of the biggest friends of open source".

News that MySQL was to bring out a closed-source add on has provoked a storm of protest across the Internet. Here is an interview with Marten Mickos trying to explain what is going on

Can Marten Mickos capture open source lightning in a bottle — twice? He previously built MySQL into an estimated $100 million open source database company that Sun ultimately acquired for $1 billion. Now, Mickos is stepping into the CEO role at Eucalyptus Systems, the open-source cloud platform provider.

Marten Mickos – the former MySQL chief executive who now heads build-you-own-cloud outfit Eucalyptus Systems – has defended the Eucalyptus platform against recent criticism of both its "open core" model and its ability to scale beyond a relatively small number of servers.

For an executive who had just had his company bought for a cool billion a few months ago and was on the eve of announcing a major update to his business' flagship database program, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now Sun Microsystems' senior vice president for databases, didn't look comfortable.

"...Marten Mickos has just acknowledge that I understood the slide quite correctly, and they will indeed develop new features in MySQL Enterprise (in 6.0), without making them available in MySQL Community. Hmm!"

Mickos [Mårten] was recruited to lead open-source database provider MySQL AB in 2001 by chief technology officer and co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius, a college classmate. Since then, the MySQL database has become one of the most popular open-source technologies around, used by many of the biggest Web 2.0 sites.

MySQL leader Marten Mickos tries to calm Linux leaders' fears of MySQL abandoning the Linux market, writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols.

MYSQL chief Marten Mickos isn't afraid his rivals in the database-software industry will ever overtake him. "Let them try," he says. "Our secret is in the way we operate our culture, and I'm convinced others cannot imitate that."