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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+
I thought it said, "Linux: Open Source Forcing Shit in Software Buying"
Fellowship 9/11
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)
They also might require you to sign over all legal rights before they'll accept code. Official GNU projects, for example, require contributors to assign to sign a contract for non-trivial code changes (assigning legal rights to the FSF and also stating that you wrote the code, an employer doesn't have any rights to it, etc). When SourceForge (Sister company to slashdot) went closed source, they had to retroactively get rights signed over and throw out some changes.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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!
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 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.
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?
And I don't want to say your arguments don't support your conclusion, but... your arguments don't support your conclusions. First, I think you're rather dramatically overstating the amount of penetration, and by extension, the impact, of OSS. What percentage of how many boxes run Linux, again?
Second, 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? It could just be me, but since they're still in the game, I suspect that they have to numbers to back up those beliefs.
Third, and while we're on the subject, your thesis totally ignores any productivity and time-to-market gains generated by deploying OSS solutions. To paraphrase an old saying, people don't want web servers, they want leads, prospects, and sales. So what OSS does do is not "lose money", but increase it, by providing smaller companies with tools and technologies and services formerly reserved to the Fortune 1000 crowd.
That being the case, I think we can safely ignore the rest of your rant and their supposed macro-economic implications.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I suspect it was marked offtopic because it is a pointless example of OSS in business. There are abundant OSS PDF writers and converters already, and the most common use of .pdfs is to export from an editable format like .odf or .doc to give a non-editable document to external organisations. That means there's not a huge incentive to create a utility to edit the files directly.
Anyone desperate to edit an existing pdf file can do so relatively easily by converting it to an editable format with a tool like Ghostscript. Having said that though, Pandaedit is the beginnings of a project to use the panda pdf libraries in a free editor. It doesn't look like it's getting much traction though.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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
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.