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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.
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
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+
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'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?
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.