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Open Source Forcing Shift in Software Buying
LISNews writes "Network World Has An Interesting article on recent buyouts and how they might change the open source landscape. They say moves by Oracle and IBM means corporate buyers should think carefully about future projects before making deployment decisions. It remains to be seen how these acquiring vendors will treat their new open source assets. Users are watching with caution. As more open source companies get gobbled up they say that the open source community likely would develop alternatives to fill the gap."
so long as the big guys don't run out of money to keep buying up the little guys.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Moves by Oracle and others force the people to put there money where there mouth is on this popular Open Source Mantra.
Mantra: "Plus if something happens to project xyz, you always have the code so you can keep going"
True, but how many are prepared to actually do it?
If the companies where once "Open Source", can the source for the last available version be used as a new starting point? So these companies get "gobbled up", it doesn't mean the stuff they already put out automatically becomes closed. If there is really an "Open Source" following for a particular application, there will be a new fork.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Thank god for licensing, at least we still have the ability to fork GPL codebases. Someone should make a list of current popular OSS programs, what their licensing is, and what we can do if that project is bought out.
corporate buyers should think carefully about future projects before making deployment decisions
Umm... shouldn't they *always* be doing this? Things like, oh, gathering requirements, modeling business processes, developing RFP's, assessing vendor and/or open source softwares capabilities? Including in the financial position of the company or the amount of volunteer support and/or commercial support of the product. Also going to current users of the software and seeing how things are working for them.
Far too often I have been thrown into situations of "here we bought this very expensive product, now make our data fit". I can't understand what people are thinking sometimes...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
This is a bit of a worry, but I don't know how well they would go trying to buy out something like Linux, or another open source program with many different distributions. I can see something like OpenOffice being bought out, but I think of the Linux community as almost as diverse as the bitTorrent community, in that there are many people who work to make Linux better, without getting paid for it, and work on many different distributions. To try to buy out Linux would be like trying to make a completely unh4x0rable program or something similar, the community's going to find some way to get around it. Still, this is not good news for Open Source programs with only a couple of different distributions, or several that are all controlled by one company or whatever. At least we hopefully don't have to worry too much about losing Linux or any such, though, due to the amount of different distributions and non-centralised community...
I thought it said, "Linux: Open Source Forcing Shit in Software Buying"
Fellowship 9/11
Are there any open source PDF editors? I know you can print to a PDF using open source software, but can you manipulate the content of an already extant PDF? Or is the Adobe tax unavoidable?
Surely this argument could be applied to any company depending on a third party in it's solution - I'd say you have a better chance with opensource though, because on the chances of a buyout your'e
a) going to be left with a fork of hackers/coders who still maintain the product (probably more likely than a commerical solution, since it's roots were in open source to begin), or
b) the code for the old program regardless (it's not going to disappear), which should be sufficient anyway (who invests such dependence of their business on the future evolution of a third party product?).
Better than relying on a company that stops because it has gone bankrupt (and chances are remains closed), or is bought out buy a firm that wants to integrate the codebase with another closed source product, so that it's no longer usable.
I'd just like to take this opportunity to say Mad props to the edita Kru, Cowboy, Zonk - keeping the pimp scene alive on the streets of harlem. Peace.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
If you liken Open Source to the raw, new matter being formed, and the corporate sector as being the older, "stable" matter, the current buying up of Open Source, and the community re-filling those gaps with yet more raw stuff, really does fit his model very well. Far better than the physical Universe did!
Adapting Sir Hoyle's model to the software world, it should be possible to make predictions on how well such a system can thrive, what adjustments would be required to keep it functional and keep the creation of new software going, and what the long-term consequences of such an environment would be. If the model is blatantly unstable, we would benefit from knowing that NOW, so we can deal with the commercial sector before it becomes a problem.
On the other hand, if the model is actually very stable and prone to accelerating, we should expect to see the corporate interest fuelling an ever-growing true F/L/OSS community, which would be no bad thing.
Instead of waxing philosophical about the whole deal, it is possible to apply abstract models that depict precisely these sorts of situations, so we can see what the longer-term results would be. Once we know what we're facing, THEN we can wax philosophical all we like, as we'll have something more solid to talk about.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If this ever happened Linux will have got a leg in the Office suite world.
I don't think we have to worry to much. Yes, big company's are buying open source firms, but think about it. Its not like they can simply close the project, or take it private. As long as there has been code published under an open source license and it falls under GPL(depending on whatever version of open source lic. they used) then they can't just say fuck you to all the contributers and privatize it. Woulnd't that break the license the original code was published under? or can they?
Companies always are looking to buy up the smaller guys, especially the "hot" ones. Right now, open source is growing as a buzzword, but there have been plenty of other examples. Seven years ago, everyone thought Internet radio was The Future(TM) and that's how Mark Cuban made his billions (selling boradcast.com to Yahoo). I'm not saying that open source will tank like Internet radio did; I just think it's analogous right now.
That said, anytime there's a leadership change there's uncertainty. Will the new coporate overlords taking over formerly community-driven projects be like Iacocca taking over at Chrysler or Eisner at Disney? It's impossible to say just yet, though that's never stopped speculation like this before. It's a delicate balance for a company to manage these community things, as Red Hat and Novell found out. Their solutions were to spawn semi-independent community projects of Fedora and OpenSuSE to serve as feeder projects for the enterprise stuff. Will IBM and Oracle follow suit? We'll see.
One only has to look at SUN and Open Office. Once SUN GPL'd the code it was out there. So even when they decided to close source it the net effect was that the code forked. We still have Open Office and always will.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
If the company want to change licenses, they must contact each and every copyright holder (programmer) to get permission. Unless the company being bought owns copyright on ALL the code, this will be difficult -- each and every right holder must be tracked down and their arm twisted enough that they agree to a license change.
On a typical open source project, many people from across the world contribute. If any one of them disagrees to a new license, their work must be removed and new code written to fill the gap. New code means time, money, and bugs.
If any significant number of developers object, it becomes very difficult to justify the license change (and thus the purchase, if they really do plan on a license change).
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You know what? This sounds like more Microsoft FUD! Perhaps they realize now that the SCO FUD is not very effective...
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The title of the parent post was supposed to have an arrow formed by an equals and a greater than sign: =>
/. didn't like it.
Guess
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I read this to mean that any Open Source software can be forked. The MIT license is just as good as the GPL in this regard. All you need is an existing copy of the source.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
What on earth are you talking about?
Sun purchased StarDivision in '99, acquiring with it the closed-source, commercial product StarOffice. They then later opened up the portions of the code they could, spawning OpenOffice, under the LGPL (not the GPL).
And Sun still pumps countless dollars and the majority of code contributions into OpenOffice.
Sun has never tried to "close the source" -- they do the same thing many other companies do: they've got the open source, libre, free version (OpenOffice) and the open source plus sundry licensed bits, commercially supported version (StarOffice).
...I'm inclined to think the correct title should be "Stir Fried". :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Isn't it more like "Open Source Landscape being altered by Big Corps buying FOSS projects" than open source changing purchasing considerations for closed source software?
The US is going thru technology deflation. In the past, a 1000 companies would have been required to buy over 2000 software packages at over 3000 each. Today, they just collaberate on an opensource software project, maybe add a few K to the pot here and there depending on their needs.
This is very good for the little guy who can now get literally millions of dollars worth of development for free, but the transition in the US economy will be very harsh. The drastic drops in cost and margin (along with Asian competition) will make it impossible to prop up the present levels of Americas debt. All this recent debt in housing is literally the worst thing they could have done after the dot com crash. The only way to stop a massive chain reaction of cascading debt default is to try and print up money to pay it off, but that is even worse than the housing debt. Because of technology deflation, printing up money will likely drive up the prices of commodities, but not pay - making the chances of default worse.
Moral, we would have saved ourselves a lot of hell if we had gold backed money that couldn't be printed up out of thin air, and if we didn't have copyrights that caused the distortion in the software and media industries to begin with.
I'll try not to be flame bait, here, but the article says: ...Or .. cannibalize it and integrate it ... and in a sense the open source product goes away?" ... or... do anything else that meets your needs. The world changes. Open source makes it easier to keep up than the monopolists "screw you, in 8 months we're not supporting it, and we're not gonna let anyone else support it either".
"The question that customers need to pay attention to is what is going to happen to the code that was open source," says Bob Igou, a research director at Gartner. "Does it remain open source?
This is, of course, a complete misunderstanding. Once open, always open. The spin on the article is that a buyer may mutate the product into something the customer doesn't want...like, say, the way Microsoft mutates its products so it won't read your old spreadsheets anymore.
As my example shows, the problem isn't limited to Open source, but only open source has the solution: Stick with the old version, modify it to suit new needs, modify it to output a new format that you're going to upgrade to, or
The article mentions that there's a worry that "great programmers" will leave the OS company once it's bought. Yeah, maybe. Maybe a buyer could commit business suicide by driving away the best people in *any* company... and maybe those good people can continue to support the OPEN product from whereever they land... or maybe, since it's open, there's ten times as many "great programmers" who have access to the code who'll take up where the originals leave off.
The writers don't get the most important fact - Microsoft's monopoly is on *products* not *service*. In terms of service, MS isn't the 800 lb gorilla - open source is. For every MS employee, there's at least 100 open source programmers. And for every one that quits, there's a dozen more young folks in college whose eyes are being opened.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I really wanted to use mod points for this discussion, but I decided to give my $.02 here.
/. haven't realized the essential truth, the free market will eventually cause these monopolies due to what I've outlined in the paragraph above.
Building software is no longer a sustainable business model. With outsourcing to the third world, and open source, there's no margin anymore. The only exception is for the big boys, who eat the little ones and become monopolistic (see Oracle, Microsoft). Or, the companies who become service companies primarily (RedHat, IBM, etc) and fund OSS.
All the advocates of the free market here on
The same thing happened in the telecom sector (deregulation followed by consolidation) because of the invisible hand of the free market. Why is everyone surprised that the same is happening in software?
Oh wait it isn't you say? You Mister BSD user then what is that smell of decay and rot? Oh that is just you, it ain't the OS?
Oh but Apple never 'bought' BSD they just used it and that is not like what is happening with Oracle and IBM.
But IBM at least has been putting a lot of its own software into OSS. They have been getting a lot of press about opensourcing its stuff it didn't buy but properly researched with its own money. So what exactly would make them in the least bit inclined to then try to reverse that with any opensource software they buy?
Not that they could if they even wanted to because of the whole GPL thing.
Oracle I am not so sure about, not that they can un-gpl something but they could certainly attempt to hurt development by hiring away the best and brightest.
But then they always could do that without buying the software companies. Just look at OSS software developers and offer the best a job.
Fundementally you can't 'buy' gpl software. Once it is out it is out. You can hire away developers but that problem isn't unique to open source. Closed source companies are doing it as well. Ballmer apperently was very upset about it recently and some chairs may have been thrown.
This is just scare mongering. Oracle may want to hurt opensource databases as they clearly interfere with its business (do you think Oracle likes it when big sites like /. show that a sorta free database does well enough?) but IBM has clearly shown that it (for now) is commited to OSS.
Ofcourse that might chance but simply buying companies and hiring developers is not a threat. Now when we hear that OSS developers are being paid on the condition they stop writing OSS software that is when alarm bells should start to ring. Not when people who write good software get money for doing so.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The business mechanisim of OSS is marxisim. It's a marxisims wet dream actually. Everybody takes what he needs, makes what he wants and all have the right amount of it.
It's software, people. It's sequences of bits. It's imaterial and the fact that you can duplicate it for no cost at all is what it's all about. What failed miserably in the real world (for obvious reasons) works extremely well in the virtual world. Marxisim.
Groups are organized not by money but by a mix of effective hierarchy, mutual interests, code of honor, hype & marketing (Ruby on Rails anyone? No way would it have come that far with the ususal crappy OSS website and without socially competent advocates) and some other soft skills. It's more like a tribal thing than a capitalistic one. It doesn't need money to work. The whole point about OSS is to make it work without money. It scares the living piss out of Microsoft and other entities that are big in the money game and have no foot in the OSS game, because it's not their league.
Remember the Mambo/Joomla! incident a few months ago? Miro thought it could pull some stunt by 'controlling' or 'regaining control' of what had become of Mambo through the community. The community walked away in something like 2 days flat. And people don't even care if there was some agenda behind it by Jamboworks. The new Joomla! thing serves the purposes of the community better while the Mambofoundation appears as nothing other than a sad and sorry scheme to benefit of others work without paying back.
Companies controlling OSS? Not if you're not willing to play the OSS game. SUN is a good positive example. For some fuzzy reason Java is considered 'sort of open source allready anyway' even by the most fanatic free-speech advocates. Why? Because they actually do their homework and really contribute. They're giving away their OS, generally nice like with the OSS community and share the ups (OpenOffice) and downs (declining interest by old school business) and thus have gained a solid reputation amoungst OSS people. By now SUN would damage itself if it would take that back again. Like SCO did. SCO played hardball - arguably in a notably stupid manner - and got the reciept for that imediately.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
A product like MySQL (or any database product) does not have to be closed source to be coupled with a closed source application. Define a formal, arms-length interface to the product and you can let closed-source applications use it through the interface. Linux does this by defining the system call interface. A database product can do it through SQL.
In addition, it is possible to make money from an open source product by offering services.
I believe that the GPL should have a clause that 5 or 10 years after publication the software falls in the public domain. This is long enough that with normally maintained software nobody will run away with it and start his own version, while it gives users the benefit that if the software is negelected at some point someone else can take over on a commercial base.
Not to worry... Open or Closed is not the issue so much as the source of innovation. You can't truly purchase creativity. As many cigar smoking, butt-kissing business guys have discovered the "lie" of "Our company cares about it's employees" pales in comparison to the ideology of OpenSource projects. To some of us, it is obvious that Open Source is a consequence of the Internet. Pre-Internet, it was possible to maintain Informational Hygiene & treat information assets like any other market commodity. Common folks just could not band together efficiently without corporate sponsorship. That veil has lifted... the Genie is out of the bottle & will not be put back. I see the evolution of Open Source as a path to a new model of business not just for software, but in the larger business community itself. I predict it will become increasingly apparent that the folks who actually do the real work will eventually understand that they don't really need the vast hordes of "pretenders" traditional business models force them to work with. Just like an individual, companies expand to the level of their incompetence visa vi "The Peter Principal". The bigger the company, the more useless baggage they acquire in terms of workers. PreInternet, it was possible for companies to leverage their position as an economic pry-bar. As an individual, I was limited by geography and the expense of travel. I simply couldn't afford to work with guys in Italy. But now I can... IBM seems to understand this. Others... not so much. I expect fortunes will be made... & squandered over this issue. In the end though the Internet itself provides groups of individuals the power of intentional collaboration free of geographic boundaries. You cannot legislate intent. Pop goes the weasel.
Relax... You're soaking in it." -Madge
GPL only relies on copyright in the first place to combat abusiveness of copyrights with respect to software.
Copyright was originally supposed to be given back to the public domain after N years. Fix copyright, don't destroy GPL's ability to combat it's abuses. It needs these protections just as much after N years, because the abuses of copyright exist just as much then. If copyright were fixed, it would be a fixed in a much better way for GPL.
The article is pure FUD, IMO. The writer is basically saying that managers should be 'scared' of buying OpenSource in case the product is "bought up and goes away or becomes proprietary". This neglects two extremely obvious points: (1) The alternative is to buy proprietary software anyway, which is already, uh, proprietary, and can also just as easily disappear, and (2) OpenSource cannot "disappear".
So in fact, using their logic for the reasons on which to base purchasing decisions, managers should actually be afraid of buying proprietary software, because the risk of the product "disappearing" is at least as great as with closed source, but if it does, you're totally screwed, unlike with OpenSource where you're at least sitting with the source code.
Nice to know that corporations will buy and profit from the code that we have produced in an open source environment. All of the work but none of the headaches (like a paycheck or insurance)...
uggg
I don't get your point here. What you said about linux will work with any OSS... the bigger it is, the faster we'll get a fork to the project, but still,even a little project with almost no community around it will revive after some time if poeple are interested... Corporate keep buying things, mix it up to meet their liking, do whatever they planed with it, and the community version either comes with the corporate soft, or pops out from nowhere as usual with OSS... So corporate are happy, claiming that they're big open source societies, and things hardly change for the community...
Yep. If the original developers sold out, it probably means they had little interest in continuing development themselves, so this can only be good. Either the buyers will continue open development, or others will, or it will continue to be as valuable as it has ever been.
So what happens when those that made their living on "sticking it to The Man" become "The Man"?
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
You missed my point. So if suddenly all the brain surgeons of the world disappear I can pick up where they left off if only I have the scalpel and other tools? I don't mean who has the programming tools, although I suspect you knew that. I mean if Oracle buys MySql I'm thinking some of the best and brightest minds on the project might end up on Oracle's payroll. For some people a real paycheck beats the hell out of charging for support. So now the people that made MySql what it is are gone. Now who is prepared to go forward?
have our cake and eat it too: (1) start open source business, (2) sell to big company, (3) profit, (4) fork the project and continue where you left off. It's awesome. Let's just hope the big companies don't catch on.
This means that the business model of the purchaser must be at least reasonable with respect to the future of the product(s) they've purchased. Notwithstanding that, of course purchasing the original copyrights does mean they can put technologies that are in the GPL code into their proprietary code with impunity - and that may be the biggest "problem" with the purchase as far as the FOSS community is concerned.
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
Sun now sells Star Office and that source is closed. That action didn't kill the open source project. It forked into Open Office. And yes they sill contribute to that project which is great. My point is that once a product is GPL'd (or LGPL'd) we never lose the source.
That's what I'm talking about.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
When an OSS product is "bought out", it is not the community, install base, or spirit of the product that is acquired. It is the copyright and trademark that are acquired, and maybe a handful of employees, and nothing else. To retain the loyalty of the community, the interest of the install base and therefore any controlling interest in the direction of the product, the acquiring entity must govern these copyrights and trademarks wisely and above all honor the spirit of the product and its license. Otherwise the community will simply fork the product and dilute the value of the transferred IP. The only thing the community stands to lose in this situation is the right to use the prior trademark with the new fork, and perhaps a few contributors who disagree with the decision to fork.
Am I missing something here?
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Ummm, as I was saying about users of Gentoo, LFS, etc: Yes, we have not just tools, but people experienced with code, people who program, people who know what to do with the tools. What the heck *is* it about programming that everybody thinks it's impossible for mere mortals to do? Where did the first programmers come from? They learned. They were the first, so nobody taught them; they taught themselves...in just one lifetime! I guess I'm perpetually at odds with most of Slashdot on this issue; I have confidence in learning. Everybody else talks about programs and programmers like they were dinosaurs: lose 'em once - gone forever!
some of the best and brightest minds on the project might end up on Oracle's payroll.
Not all of the brilliant people are famous. Since I mentioned Gentoo: it managed to lose it's lead developer suddenly to the exact same "real paycheck" scenario you quote. So somebody else stepped forward and Gentoo's still kicking. It *can* happen. But if you feel better worrying, then worry away.
It's an interresting article, but IMHO it doesn't reflect, why big Companys like IBM or Oracle should invest (or buy) OSS.
The Problem for Corporations is that the GPL, as well as many other licensing models, is mandatory. You cannot gain control of it, unless ALL developers give their permittance. Just imagine how IBM tries to track down AND convince EVERY SIGLE ONE of the thousands (if not millions, I don't know) of Linux developers. Funny picture, isn't it? the code will never be worth (of course not the idealistic, but the commercial one) the effort. Here, pure marxism, as it was meant, collides with a capitalistic system.
But nonetheless there are some huge advantages, commercial as well as idealistic ones, for the companies investing in OSS.
First, as the article mentioned, you don't have to care about support from other companies, you can do it by yourself, and paying a developer to maintain the software is much cheaper than to migrate to a new Version of the propieretary Software or even change the Software, because the development has stopped, every two (or so) years. So using it would provide you with a guaranteed low TOC.
Second, a company that invests in OSS has the possibility to act as sort of "white knight". Like it or not, but many OSS developers are VERY good coders, some of them probably the best in this world; and they are strong idealist. If you want to have some thousands of the most important computer experts as customers, you have to invest in public relations, and supporting OSS is a very effective (and not too expensive) way to do so.
Third is something more commercial. For that we could take a view, how apple manages its investments into OSS. They give their OS away freely and open sourced under the name Darwin. But most MAC OS apps does not run on Darwin, because it misses the libraries to run them (for example the COCOA Framework). So they can outsource the biggest ammount of R&D to very good coders, who are NOT EVEN PAYED! The wet dream of any CEO, isn't it? Get the best possible work for free. Not even outsourcing to some programmers in Taiwan is that cheap. (Sorry to all coders from Taiwan, but you know, what I mean.)
So you see, marxism and capitalism CAN work together, and the products are worth every minute of work and every cent paid. That are of course just some of the reasons why commercial organisations can suceed through investing in something, which cannot be controlled, and sometimes not even selled, but I think some of the more important ones.
How shall I know what I think before I read what I wrote?