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."

Comments

Sure, they can fill in the gaps

[ScrewMaster]

so long as the big guys don't run out of money to keep buying up the little guys.

Re:Sure, they can fill in the gaps

[geminidomino]

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.

Money where mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Money where mouth is

[Hosiah]

True, but how many are prepared to actually do it?

News flash: FOSS distros come with FOSS programming tools: compilers, interpreters, scripting engines, libraries, documentation, et all. Not much point *to* open source code, if all you can do with it is read it, eh? True, many distros are poorly prepared for programming needs, and I shun them and shame them, but even the most threadbare distro has a scripting tool or compiler or two or five.

I've made periodic policies to obtain the full sources for major installed distros I've run, such as Red Hat and Slackware. Despite the wonders of package management, many times those of us with finickier tastes have to resort to compiling a tarball to get the program we want. And then there's distros like Linux From Scratch, Gentoo, and Sourcemage, where the whole idea is to build it from source code, piece by piece.

So rest assured, if you *nuked* 90% of the open-source organizations, the rest of us could replenish the well in, oohhh, given sufficient cooperation and bittorrent seeding, about a week.

Re:Money where mouth is

[howlingmadhowie]

someone once told me that 95% of software development takes place in companies and is never released to the public or sold. basically company-A needs a new plug-in for product-B and writes it themselves.

personally i find the 95% rather exaggerated, but my point should be clear. lots of companies write their own software, and this software is never seen outside of the company. lots of companies use proprietary software which is no longer supported by manufacturers and have to somehow keep it cobbled together themselves.

this is also the reason why linux runs on ca. 80% of all supercomputers, because these people who have just spent many hundreds of millions on a computer want to know what the computer is doing and they want the best software. they can afford to hire 100 people to write the software and linux provides the best environment for this currently available.

Fork

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

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.

Makes me a bit nervous

[Azureflare]

I like my OSS the way it is. I think this is one weakness of OSS. We can't really say as a community that we don't want a company to buy out a project, because we don't really have any "share" so to speak in the project. The only thing we can do is annoy people, but those people are facing a very large paycheck, and are very unlikely to listen to what we say, even if they do care about our concerns.

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.

Brilliant

[plopez]

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...

Re:Brilliant

[luvirini]

The problem is.. too often people do not simply think in business situations, letting prestige be the deciding factor instead of need or opportunity.

Heh, I read the title of this story wrong!

[Bombcar]

I thought it said, "Linux: Open Source Forcing Shit in Software Buying"

Too all my hoes in Detroit, Bali, & the Eastsi

[RiotXIX]

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.

Sir Fred Hoyle's Last Laugh

[jd]

Fred Hoyle, who rejected the Bing Bang theory and developed the rival "Continuous Creation" model, in which the Universe expanded and matter was continuously condensing and filling in the gaps, would have loved the current Open Source model.

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.

FUD, or writers aren't up on what Open is.

[JetScootr]

I'll try not to be flame bait, here, but the article says:
"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? ...Or .. cannibalize it and integrate it ... and in a sense the open source product goes away?"
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 ... 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 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.

Re:do we need to worry?

[JoshDanziger]

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.

Open Source will eat itself

[oncebitten]

I really wanted to use mod points for this discussion, but I decided to give my $.02 here.

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 /. haven't realized the essential truth, the free market will eventually cause these monopolies due to what I've outlined in the paragraph above.

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?

The business mechanisims of OSS

[Qbertino]

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.