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Open Source Licensing - Cuts Both Ways?
shortscruffydave writes "The Register is running a piece Open source databases - a sword that cuts both ways? which mentions one of the potential pitfalls of open source databases: "Open source is just another licensing model: the more accepted it becomes, the more it is adopted at a strategic level, the more it plays back into the hands of the traditional behemoths that dominate the industry". " I couldn't disagree more with the author of this piece, since I think the success of Postgres & MySQL are already contra-proof positive, but the piece is still an interesting read.
It's still a good idea as it allows third parties to write plugins and conduits more easily for it.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
The arguments given in the article are inadequate IMHO, they are just as and mostly more applicable to closed source software.
The key argument for open source vs closed source is: The source is available, you can support/develop it by your own or hire in support/development/warranty, now try that with closed source.
All disadvantages for open source are at least applicable for closed source, closed source has no real advantage on open source.
Licensing is what keeps those behemoths from getting their hands on these
applications. It is interesting that the writer didn't tell us what option
he'd prefer - a closed license or no license at all. MySQL is offering a
choice of a commercial license or open-source. Money is important for the
survival of the company that markets open-source products but open-source
licenses don't restrict companies from charging for their product and MySQL
is a good example for how to deal with the issue.
Paragraph 1: Intro
Paragraph 2: Planning considerations
Paragraph 3: Existing players
Paragraph 4: Business considerations
Paragraph 5: Unsupported assertions
Paragraph 6: Unsupported assertions
Who founded Bloor Research? Who funds them? Who owns stock in them? Who are the members of their executive board and what are their social connections?
This is a really bad piece.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
The article is right, which ever piece of software, you are locked into using the program the way the author designed, you are locked into the upgrade paths the author leads you, you are locked into any future costs the author charges.
Yes you can change the platform you are based on, but this typically costs more money than it is worth.
Yes you could modify the source, but this will cost more money than it is worth in R&D.
I.E., yes you are locked in, in the same way that the traditional behemoths that dominate the industry haved succesfully negotiated.
I may have misread TFA, but the author appears to have missed the strategic value that is to be gained from investing staff and company hours into F/OSS projects for internal use.
The article seems to view the present hobbyist-driven projects as solutions procured in the same way that a company buys in commercial programming. The differences in modus operandi are so great that this cannot be the case. The trick is to find where the middle ground lies in order to profit.
"Dude, you're giving IBM free shit... they're not going to return the favor."
Except they have? Article looks like flamebait/trolling to me, or else just ignorance.
rooooar
For MySQL you could be right, but Postgres? It's not backed by a commercial group as is MySQL, and while it can be seen in a LOT of commercial (enterprise) situations, it's still a tiney speck compared to it's commercial backed friend MySQL (even though it is much more of a "real" db).
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The benefit of open source is that if the original corporation writing the code stops supporting it there may be a community behind the software that will continue to support it as you transition. Also, another company may spring up with the same codebase.
--Keith
the more it is adopted at a strategic level, the more it plays back into the hands of the traditional behemoths that dominate the industry
WHAT?!?!? You mean the "behemoths" can use open source too? How could this happen??!?! NO NO NO NO!!!!!
[Sarcasm off]Well what do you expect. Don't forget that opensource software != free software. of course the big guys will start using opensource too, now that they've started to see that light. What did anyone expect? Did you want to FSF to have a monopoly on opensource forever? I think not. I think the result of "big behemoths" switching to open source will be more secure software being delivered to end users. That's the whole point of OSS!
I for one welcome our opensource behemoth overlords.
A more full treatment of the TFA topic can be found in Coase's Penguin.
From the abstract:
My personal spin is that, just as the printing press broke down the medieval market on literacy, so the GPL will increasingly educate the masses.
Props to RMS, the modern Gutenberg.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I'll boil down the entire article to one sentance: "If you're implementing any type of 'strategic' software system, make certain you make sound business decisions when you choose the software."
Know what you're buying. Know who you're buying it from. Consider the entire lifecycle of the software solutions you're building. Oh, and there was a throwaway blurb about open source.
If this qualifies as an "interesting read", I weep for the future of humanity. You know it's bad when the Slashdot summary is just as informative as the actual article.
The central point seems to be that a company looking for an OSS product which is supported by a large company, will end up going with a large company's OSS product.
Oh, wow. Insightful +1
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
I'm sure some of you may know, but many of you may be unaware that large enterprises need to be really choosy in the database solution that they use. Its not simply a matter of installing the cheapest DB. When you consider the sizable investment made by an IT department on the hardware and operating system platform, it really makes sense to invest wisely in the product that will actually retain all your company's data.
With that said, given the choice between installing a poorly supported, poorly documented open source database, or something like Microsoft SQL Server, its obvious which solution will let you keep your cushy IT position. Furthermore, as good as I have to admit MySQL is, it still does not have support for such common things as triggers, views or even basic stored procedures never mind data warehousing.
For these open source products to be taken seriously, the same sort of fundamental support and functionality will need to prevail as the costs of not having these far outweigh the monetary costs of the common retail solution.
No doubt that there are valid reasons for a commercial database vendor. But that guy makes about as much sense as the drooling drunk at 2am in front of the seedy night club in the bad part of town when it comes to "strategic decisions".
Strategic decisions by definition are dangerous. When you decided on PeopleSoft 10 years ago this looked strategically sound. Until the good burgers from Oracle came along and bought them out in order to squash a competitor. By no fault of your own you are fucking fucked when you're a PeopleSoft customer.
Au contraire I argue that especially in the db market having source access to your database software is about as strategically valuable as it comes.
Sorry mate, but I have seen to many examples of customers being fucked over by vendors of strategic software and you can go and tell the PR department of { Oracle | Microsoft | IBM } that they are just dead wrong and for an "analyst" it's bad form to just reprint their spew.
Not that I accuse you of doing that, but your "analysis" leaves a strong stench of not being quite independant.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
If your using a closed source database and the company that owns it goes down the pan you're just stuffed.
If its open, at least you have a chance to adapt and tinker to fix it.
Though in either case you'd probablly just go with a different provider.
Because he want's to say that it's not proof would simply mean that the original author's proposition was unproven. What the submitter was trying to say, though, is that the success of MySQL and Postgres prove the opposite.
The article is saying that there is no money in open source, so the developers could walk away at any time and leave you stranded with an unsupported product.
For those who didn't know redhat just posted record profits, and the share price just jumped about 12%.
There is certainly money being made in open-source. The difference is: open-source will not die without money.
First off, open-source projects don't need to make money. Secondly, if users are dependent on them, they don't go away.
The "problem" that Bloor describes is either a phantom or self-correcting, whichever way you choose to look at it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Say I claim that the sky is red and offer evidence to that effect. If my evidence is inadequate, then it's not proof. If my evidence proves that the sky is definitely not red, then it's contra-proof: it proves the opposite of what I am claiming.
It would be less awkward to say "proof negative," but the contra- prefix is common in philosophical circles where this sort of fine distinction is usually relevant.
Damn straight - Open source software can be and should be strategic. When an enterprize selects strategic software they need to know that it will be around (and supported) for the long-haul. Millions of dollars could be riding on the issue.
So, in a large sense, I agree with the author and will even say that in some cases, there is justifiable concern for an enterprize to avoid open software solutions.
Having said all that, I'm far from opposing open source software in the enterprize, quite to opposite in fact. Products like MySQL and Apache prove that there is a lot of room and potential in big business for OSS.
Anyone -- including big business needs to do a sort of risk evaluation before settling on anything that has the ability to affect the bottom line. For a public company it is more than business sense, it is the law. They need to know that the people they bring in on a project can do what they say they can do and just as importantly, that they will be around tomorrow to fix anything that is broken or needs changing.
For this reason, the enterprize level open source market will probably grow through pretty conventional methods. Either there will be in-house expertiese or they will hire consulting firms with the skill, knowlege, and expertise to deliver. Those firms will in many cases be old, established, familiar names that recognize the need and make the right moves to get in the market.
This isn't bad at all. It brings OSS legitamacy.
This is the same view of Fortune 500 Enterprise that Toronto has of its role within Canada. Whether the other nine provinces have ceased to exist depends on who you ask.
Sorry but until the author of the article actually does something with FOSS in the corperate world and knows how it really works he's simply another idiot spewing worthless drivel on the street corner at cars passing by.
we hafe a few ATL tape library units here at the datacenter. upgrading PAST windows NT4 means we have to pull those units and throw them away. ATL refuses to release drivers for them for 2K or 2K3 and suggest "buy our new product".
great, over $180,000.00US investment in WORKING SDLT robotic tape libraries because the company wants to drive revinue by forcing new hardware purchases. yet Linux and a couple of other FOSS packages saved that and they are now working along happily in our datacenter.
So all that development we did to support the tape library robitic units was a waste? Programmer time is dirt fricking cheap right now compared to enterprise level hardware costs. we built the platform on FOSS parts, those were free to us, so why do we needto be greedy assholes and not give out what we coded that was BUILT UPON the work already done by others?
I reccomend that everyone ignore the article as a know nothing screaming about things he read in a trade magazine.... because it is missing huge pieces of the puzzle that many many of us use every single day to save money and INCREASE revinue of the company.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But putting aside that snippy, meaningless sales argument for a moment, we usually didn't care whether the client chose Open Source or Closed Source database tech (as long as we had someone on staff familiar with it). Our thought was that if we weren't paying for the tools we didn't care which system was chosen. We started to care after a custom van shop in Arizona wanted to use an all Microsoft platform (out of fear we'd abandon them and they wouldn't know what to do with this open source stuff). Being a startup though, they ran themselves in the ground and naturally our fees weren't paid due to the heavy fees they owed to Microsoft. After that, we'd push Open Source a little more if there was any sort of financial question about the company.
But the fact that we weren't a huge company did scare many clients. They were much more comfortable knowing that their cousin could fix something in Microsoft Access if we disappeared from the face of the earth, but they wouldn't have any idea what to do with a PostgreSQL data repository. This usually meant that either we'd use their preferred closed source tools or we'd create some extra tools for them for free to dump the repository to csv and tab separated formats.
Inevitably someone would ask me, personally, which dbms I thought was a better investment. I always loathed that question (since I was a programmer and not a salesman). But it usually came down to which programming environment I preferred and which environment I thought the salesperson had recommended. But looking back on it, if you were hiring our team to design the database that's where most of your expense would be. If you wanted to pay additional money to Microsoft for the database that was fine, but it wasn't going to reduce our costs any.
I recently chaired a panel discussion on enterprise open-source, attended by representatives from several dozen Fortune 500 companies, and we turned the discussion back on them at one point. Turns out that:
1) all had made a "commitment" to open-source products;
2) almost none had done anything strategic up to that point (they all had a little Linux and a little Apache/MySQL floating around here and there, of course)
3) NONE were interested in the cost-reductions available with F/OSS
4) ALL were interested in the advanced technology which they felt was probably more available from F/OSS then from incumbent vendors
5) ALL were holding back waiting for better support options.
There was a lot of discussion about the latter point, including some really fascinating suggestions that belong in another discussion. But for here and now, the key thing is that you don't necessarily look for support for OSS DBMSs from the developers. Something like the Pervasive model is interesting, as long as they continue to maintain close ties with the developer communities. But OSS support is a service business, with linear cost-scaling characteristics, so we will need a lot of vendors to pitch in. I think it's a nascent large opportunity.
It is interesting that the writer didn't tell us what option he'd prefer
Well that's no surprise, given that the article said nothing of any substance whatsoever.
In effect what we have here is a manager of some sort seeking justification for his role in applying "strategy management" to open source. I bet the managers around him think that he's really cool and clued up on all this.
In reality, he just doesn't understand that the value of FOSS doesn't come from the financial muscle and longevity of its corporate backers at all. His entire position is 100% ill-founded, and he has no clue whatsoever about the power that FOSS can give his company. "Just another licensing model" says it all, really.
More like just another PHB or management type, totally out of his depth but still eager for control.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Not all of the companies involved will be able to make enough money out of these products to stay in business. That means that at some point in the future the market will consolidate and a number of these products will disappear.
Complete bullshit. The companies will disappear, but the product will live on in sourceforge (or where ever), exactly oppositite of what this inexperienced author says. Every customer of the product will have a copy of the source, which at least allows them the option of continuing development and support internally. This simply cannot be said for closed, commericial software.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
Of course you disagree. You're a wingman in one of the most spectacular business model failures of open source. What, were you going to get up on your own bloody site and scream from the rooftops that the OS model of software licensing has flaws that could be exploited by people who made it big by exploiting flaws in systems?
Of course, I don't see why you don't just do it. With a 2.38% share drop being less in cash than it costs to buy a piece of Bazooka Joe, it doesn't look like VA Software could really suffer too much more regardless of what you do.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Whenever I see an article criticising open source software, I do a quick check to see if the author has his head up his ass:
Step 1: Replace the phrase "open source" with "closed source."
Step 2: Replace names of open source products with the names of their closed-source counterparts.
Check if the article's arguments and criticisms still apply. If so, the author hasn't written a critique of open source software, he's written a critique of software, and probably not a terribly insightful one at that.
The article brings to my mind an interesting scenario...
... great! Until you realize that your OSS program is now the cornerstone of a BUSINESS. *YOUR* business. How will money be divided? Taxes taken out? Accounting? (Now we rue the lack of financial packages for Linux!)
You're a developer of an OSS project, along with several others (geographically diverse). You get a call one day...
"Hi, This is Clueful Manager from MegaCorp. We'd like to use your software in our business."
You say "Sure, go ahead; it's open source. Of course it'd be nice if you'd donate to our project..."
CM says "Yes, that's why I'm calling. We'd like some extra functionality added, and we're willing to pay you to add it. What do you say?"
Maybe MegaCorp will hire you; but then you're their employee, subject to their restrictions.
Maybe they hire you as a contractor; but then what about the other devels? Are they out of luck just because it's your email that's in the README?
Maybe MegaCorp's expecting to treat you like a vendor. In which case you'd need to supply invoices, bills, tax info, and all the other things a 'real' business would supply.
WARNING TO OSS DEVELOPERS: Success is coming! You need to think about what you're going to leverage the success of your software. Do you want a profit? Or just enough to pay the bills? Do the other devels agree with you? Or, do you ignore all such requests, unless they interest you as interesting challenges?
(Na na na na na na na na na na)
sulli
RTFJ.
Read the -1 FUD post, because that's useful, but here's my take on your questions (and I'm not a lawyer, so this is just my interpretation). If you want support at all for MySQL from the company, you need a commercial license. You didn't ask that, but that's the easy one.
If you don't redistribute it, you don't need the commercial license. Note that if you don't distribute code from any open source license, including GPL, you don't need to open your code. OS licenses are based on copyright law, and copyright law doesn't restrict private use, only redistribution (in a general sense). The caveat to that is that I've heard there are some licenses that specifically require you to submit back changes you've made, even if you don't redistribute it, but I don't have any experience w/ those.
Your second question is trickier. The tone on the licensing site is that yes, you would need a license to do that, unless you released your code under the GPL license. This is the whole "linked library" issue that a lot of commercial entities use to say why they don't use GPL software. However, if you made your system db-agnostic, such that the user could use any database and configured that choice on their own, then I don't think you would have to. You should be making your app db-agnostic anyway, but that means you can't embed non-ANSI-standard SQL statements in your code (i.e. statements that could only run on MySQL) or use other MySQL-specific functions and not distribute it as GPL'ed code. You couldn't redistribute the MySQL w/ your code in that case, but you said you weren't going to anyway.
As far as I know, no open source software has been found to have mis-appropriated source code in it, yet it has been shown that a number of closed-source products have mis-appropriated code from open source projects in them, making the argument even more silly.
If I develop A, I still see there is no protection keeping company M from reselling A and making additional money selling add-ons; all for a product that I created. M owes me no money, nor do the add-ons garner me any royalties.
Assuming A is licensed under the GPL, you can also sell M's add-ons, and contract to create enhancements to A that rely on those add-ons, so you can benefit from M's work just as much as they benefit from yours.
BTW, I've also done for-pay OSS work recently. Right now I'm writing closed-source software that makes heavy use of OSS components (and carefully complies with all of the relevant licensing requirements). My employer (IBM) is doing lots of both OSS and closed source development, and profiting from nearly all of it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
In certain circumstances, open source projects are very dependent on vendor support. For example, MySQL (because even the client libs are licensed under essentially the GPL, which prevents linking with many other open source projects), and to a lesser extent BerkelyDB. If MySQL AB went out of business today, MySQL (the open source database management system) IMO would likely be seriously wounded. Yes, it may continue, but I don't think it would continue with anywhere near the momentum it has today until such a time as a new version comes out with a new protocol.and completely rewritten client libs.
You can divide open source software into two groups. There are those which are dual licensed (esp. those which are restrictively dual-licensed, such as MySQL) and there are those which are real community projects. The first case could be effectively destroyed or at least set back a number of years by the vendor going out of business, while the second will continue without anyone.
The article makes the mistake of assuming that these are the same. They are not.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP