I just read Matt Asay's blog post MySQL adoption: Deep and wide in which he refers to an anecdote on Jonathan Schwarz's blog about MySQL adoption in the enterprise.

In the anecdote, Jonathan meets with a CIO who claims that they don't run MySQL.  A Sun sales rep counters this claim with the tidbit that there had been 1300 downloads of MySQL from that company in the last year.

This is not uncommon — we frequently hear from CIOs who tell us they barely use any open source.  However when we use OSS Discovery to scan their machines, we find they are using a heck of a lot more open source than they realize.  This was the impetus for launching The Open Source Census yesterday.

So I decided to go check on the status of MySQL in The Open Source Census.  I found that of the 400+ machines scanned to date, about 37% had MySQL installed.

If this CIO participates in The Open Source Census, he will know how much open source and which open source packages are being used in the company.  And he will be able to compare his open source usage to that of similar companies.

Maybe Sun will pass it on.

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/freedom_s_choice