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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."
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?
I think the implication is that the little guys will keep making OSS companies in hopes of being bought out by the big guys, making a killing, and retiring to a tropical island at 30-something.
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...
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?
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)
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?
I think interbase/firebird makes an interesting study. Borland open sourced it, then they tried to close it again but it was too late. It got forked became open sourced and thrived. The borland product is pretty much dead.
There ya go, a real life example.
evil is as evil does
Actually, GPL and any other open source license I know of. But the real issues are: will anybody step up to the plate? Will the development keep the same pace?
Does it really need to keep the same pace? Do new features need to be implemented, or is it alright if the community is only able to step up to provide bug fixes? I would assume the latter would be fine for just about everyone and would require much fewer man hours. I would imagine the community around pretty much every major open source software package could scrounge up enough people to handle that kind of work load.
What percentage of how many boxes run Linux, again?
It's not driven by the amount, but the uptake. Which for Linux , apache, firefox , etc is obviously very high
do you think IBM, to pick an example, is into OSS for their health? Or do you think, just maybe, they believe they'll make up lost software sales in service, maintenance, and support, and in the hardware needed to deploy those solutions?
You don't get it, this is the way the market is going wether it provides IBM optimum profit or not. IBM learnt that the hard way with OS2. The fact is that if all your competitors are reducing their costs because of OSS, then you had better too or get whats comming to you.
your thesis totally ignores any productivity and time-to-market gains generated by deploying OSS solutions.
And yours ignores the fact that most of the productivity gains had already been squeesed out by proprietary software. Those transitions to oss will not increase productivity, but only reduce costs, hence DEFLATIONARY!
That being the case, I think we can safely ignore the rest of your rant and their supposed macro-economic implications.
Do so at your own risk, but don't be supprised when gold breaks 1000/oz. Technology deflation is a well understood concept. The last time we had tech deflation this bad was in 1855, just before the civil war. Those plantation masters who thought that they could leverage inventions like the cotton-gin to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit were wrong. The media and software companies who think that they can leverage inventions like the internet to expand their copyright licensing for unlimited growth and profit, well? Well, all freaking information age hell is about to break loose.