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Open Source Forcing Shift in Software Buying

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the open-source-good-for-the-digestion-also dept.

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."

3 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Fork by Saeed+al-Sahaf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  2. Brilliant by plopez · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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+
  3. Re:do we need to worry? by JoshDanziger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think that the problem might be a little bit more subtle. Let's use MySQL as the example here. They offer an open-source, free-as-in-beer version of the application. They also offer a closed-source, commercial version that comes with more support.

    A second market for MySQL is commercial licenses of the DB. In other words, some company wants to distribute MySQL or tightly couple MySQL to their closed source application. Because the GPL prohibits such coupling in closed-source software, these companies need to acquire a commercial license.

    Now, lets say that MySQL is bought out by Evil Enterprises. Bless the open source community, they successfuly fork MySQL and cleverly call it OurSQL. Unfortunately, OurSQL uses 100% GPL code. The implication? The OurSQL developers can't offer the commercial closed-source license that MySQL could. This closes a potential source of revenue for developers of this new OurSQL software.

    I don't know if its a big issue or not, but I certainly haven't seen it mentioned on the forums yet. Feel free to bash me as you see fit.