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Open Season On Open Source?
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece looking at the possible future of open source. The article's conclusion is that it might be grim. From the piece: 'Software giant Oracle Corp. has acquired two small open-source companies and is in negotiations to buy at least one more. Many experts believe this is the beginning of a broader trend in which established tech companies scoop up promising open-source startups. While the validation is thrilling it's also unsettling. Many young idealists who set out to create an alternative to the tech Establishment now find themselves becoming part of it.'"
The young idealists who let themselves be bought are the only ones affected. Everybody else can still fork if they have any kind of major problem. This is a non-issue.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
> Many young idealists who set out to create an alternative to the tech Establishment now find themselves becoming part of it.
:)
If they realy care about idealism, they won't sell. I think if M$ offered RMS a billion dollars for the FSF, he would refuse. (Mostly because he is slightly insane, but in a good way
My other car is first.
Now you're complaining? Millions of poets, the world over, would kill prose for such an opportunity.
Plagiarised without attribution from:l .3.178798.34
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joe
I thought the last step was always "Profit!" ... what do we do next if we don't profit?
Folks on slashdot are always talking about how it's possible to make money on free/open source software, and that F/OSS is the wave of the future. Well, if you *really* believe this, why are you shocked that large companies agree with you? Or that people who start open source projects agree with you?
My guess is that a lot of the people who talk about making money off of F/OSS don't really believe it in their gut. They really believe that F/OSS is always going to be a volunteer activity, not a business model.
The whole thing is just "blah blah, we don't understand open source and refuse to learn". The only thing unsettling is that "journalists" are too stupid to read.
"We are moving aggressively into open source," said Chief Executive Lawrence J. Ellison at a Feb. 8 investor conference. "We are not going to fight this trend."
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There's nothing new in this. Big business is always trying to beat down the small guy by saying that "You won't succeed without our money and expertise. Give up now and sell to us or you are doomed." Open source is just the latest arena to get the treatment. Sometimes true, but often corporate bureaucrats prove far less adept at running a concern than the small guy who's become tough and shrewd because he's had to live by his wits with sod-all in the bank. Corporate bureaucrats are very good at overpaying, though, and you can hardly blame anyone for taking a fabulously absurd sum if it's on offer.
As for Mr Ellison, he can't have it both ways. In the interview on which this article is based, he first paid homage to open source which these days is about as controversial as calling for fresh air and clean drinking water. He then affected to find Mysql to be so small as to be beneath his radar but curiously knew all about it. That Ellison should find a company a tiny percentage of Oracle's size such a thorn says more about his tender ego than anything else. There's absolutely no guarantee that Oracle's "aggressive" buying spree will do it any good. The moment they think they've plucked out one thorn, another will appear in its place.
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tournoun pas maï
They don't know what they're buying. They think if they buy an open-source company they're getting "open-source". They don't get a free community unless they understand it. They dont get the product they think they're getting. Software companies have been trying to make their customers be unpaid beta testers for years and frequently they think this is a cheaper shortcut to that end. They waste the community's effort. This isn't just the case with FOSS, it's generally the case with most company acquisitions, it's just more obviously idiotic with FOSS.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
That is a sad story. That is definately not what Open Source is about. Unfortunately it is a result of you deciding to select Redhat as your first Linux Distrobution. Redhat is really an enterprise version of Linux that I would only recommend to medium-large businesses that want the reassurance of having a supported version of Linux.
If you want an easy to use, polished Linux Distrobution that *Just Works out of the box* with a thriving community I recommend that you try Ubuntu Linux (http://www.ubuntu.com/). You will like the Ubuntu difference (http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu):
"Ubuntu is Free Software, and available to you free of charge. It's also Free in the sense of giving you rights of Software Freedom, but you probably knew that already! Unlike many of the other commercial distributions in the free and open source world (Libranet, Lindows, Xandros, Red Hat) the Ubuntu team really does believe that Free software should be free of software licencing charges."
In fact they will even send you a copy free of charge (they will even pay for postage):
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
You can safely use/deploy Ubuntu knowing that you will never be caught in an expensive update cycle. Ubuntu is tailored for the Desktop and as a result offers a superior Desktop experience than 'Redhat Enterprise Linux' which is more tailored for servers anyway.
Also you will always be able to get Firefox from the firefox website (http://www.getfirefox.com/ absolutely free of charge (although they do welcome donations). Firefox strives to be a free, standards compliant web browser that aims to work on many different platforms (i.e. ensuring that you don't have to buy Windows in order to surf the Internet).
How about "[...] Many young idealists who set out to create an alternative to the tech Establishment now find themselves successfully infiltrating it, and changing the landscape as we know it."
Software is becoming a commodity. The business is heading in the direction of services. Once Oracle has reached market saturation - everyone who is going to use Oracle, is - the only way they can grow is by selling people their knowledge on how best to use Oracle. And the fact that Oracle is dipping its toes in the sea of open source only goes to show that at some point, the commodity itself will retail at its actual cost of (re-)production: the cost of the bandwidth for downloading it.
/or so sayeth the idealist
yes, we have no bananas
Let me get this straight, people are spending big money to buy up open source companies left and right and because of that we should be concerned about the future of open source?????
..... once people figure out that they can make companies that are pratically guaranteed to get bought out at over valued prices or become profitable open-source ventures if they dont. And even better, chances are that 90% of the of the software they start their base off of is likely already developed. I wouldn't be supprised to see a nuclear explosion in the open source software industry bigger than the dot.com and the PC boom and the integtrated circuit boom combined.
How about an alternative view
If Oracle et al were snapping these companies up for pennies on the dollar, THAT would be grim. Since they seem to be paying good money for them, the most likely effect is for them to attract new developers who have the basic business plan of
1) Write open-source software
2) Sell out to The Man
3) Profit!!
Of course, for most of them Step 2 ain't going to work out and Step 3 will be a mirage in the distance, but open source still benefits from Step 1.
For decades, the only people who cared about open source were the geeks who stayed up for all hours swilling Jolt Cola and writing code.
I'm sure he means that in a good way. Suits can't stand open source. It makes no sense to them that innovation is driven by creativity and passion, not hierarchy and the bottom line.
by killing the entire concept of a paid programmer altogether.
:)
Theoretically speaking, that is.
If Firefox continues to improve in quality, it will become so superior to the likes of Opera and MSIE that it'll be the biggest and nearly only game in town. At some point, who wants to buy a browser when they can get the free and super secure Firefox version for, potentially, every platform? At some point MicroSoft falls so far behind with MSIE that they cannot afford to continue hiring programmers here or abroad to update it, and they may sell off or close down the MSIE line.
Now if Open Office improves similarly, MS Office could be endangered. Why buy MS Office if you can get an equal ROI for free with Open Office?
Perhaps Linux gets tons of hyper consumer grade (as in, your grandma could use it without breaking a sweat) facelifts, while holding onto its power user underpinnings. Easily done, actually. If all programs are written as procedures in shared object libraries, you could make both command line and graphical user front ends to call them, and a really crazy coder would give the user a 'command line equivalent' submenu option for the GUI version so the wanna-be power user could see how the command line version would have done the work. That would result in perfect scaleability. At some point, Linux catches up with Windows in Suzi Office Worker appeal, and its privacy, anti DRM, etc. advantages, drives Windows into irrelevancy. What's left of driver support problems are resolved, and whammo, MicroSoft finds itself losing sales at a catastrophic level.
Offshore and domestic coders of *any* app could theoretically be, despite their cheapness, be put out of work by a wetware beowulf cluster of hobbyist coders and volunteer testers tired of paying for any software, period, and who are hell bent upon matching the functionality of current for-pay software.
There are a number of factors holding back open source, though, not the least of which is Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, aka pro-Commercial Software Propaganda.
But if these barriers fall, open source could theoretically force many, many offshore and domestic software manufacturing companies to compete against FREE and BETTER software. This is very bad GNUs for their bottom line.
At that point the market weighs far more heavily toward providing services instead of selling software, and then a lot of that involves face to face work.
The math says that offshore outsourcing stands to lose a heaping mountain of money as Open Source moves further into maturity. Of course, domestic IT has already suffered; out of work domestic coders have great potential to inflict spiteful vengeance by producing a GPL'd product that provides the same functionality as the software being written by the people who took their jobs, and then convincing companies to go with the free product instead.
LOL, even if this post gets modded down, the cat is now officially out of the bag.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Lets be realistic for a second- with the exception of some big projects (kernel, KDE, GNU-sponsored projects) and corporate projects (such as Inter7's vpopmail funded by its own customers, or uw-imap being funded by a university), most of the smaller or lesser-known open source developers are doing something that they enjoy and gaining experience. They're adding a line on the resume, and fulfilling a need which they have (I need a program that does ____) or that someone they know has.
Given that, this is experience. It's a way to make a name for yourself, perfect your skills, and give back to the community. That doesn't mean these people are against closed source, but they feel that their product will get more exposure if it's open and freely available.
Most developers aren't in the "it has to be OSS" mentaility, but rather in the "this project could be bigger if more people contributed", and of course that project is their baby- their time, their effort.
Again not to say that this is all of the cases, but without direct benefits, there's always something- be it credit, fame, or experience.
Now some bigger projects doing it is what this article is speaking of, but the general statement on open source is bogus! Open source simply says "this could be of value to someone else, and admitedly, they could probably reproduce it anyway by starting from scratch".
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
You can't buy opensource. Once it is out there, it is out there. If it is true opensource the code doesn't even belong to a single entity that can be bought. If you contribute some code no matter how small to a opensource project even though you do it under the GPL it still belongs to you. In fact that is what the GPL is pretty much about. You just give everyone else the right to use it (within certain limits) as they wish.
Yes you can hire the developers away from a project in the hope of killing it but why would this be a worry to opensource alone? EVERY project, commercial, political, social can be killed by its enemies by luring the people involved away. It can be very upsetting, just ask Ballmer.
It is nothing new. In fact several opensource people even started working for the beast. The gentoo guy for one. Except he left again pretty quickly.
And that I think is the reason opensource in fact has less to worry about then commercial projects about being bled of its developers. It is a huge difference to work on your own time for a volunteer project and to have to work for your salery on markettings whims.
Most of the bigger opensource projects are done for free by people who wouldn't have any trouble at all doing the same thing for money. In fact most do. There is one thing business week doesn't get about developers. They love it!
A developer will happily work all week coding to support himself to code in weekend as well. People like that can be tempted with money but not for long. When someone is willing to work for free they obviously think that a salery is only there to pay the bills.
But of course, it makes a nice headline because a handfull of companies with opensource projects are being attempted to be bought up (mysql refused didn't it?). Opensource is about as death as socialism. Just check you paycheck how much of your salery goes to social security.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...is that it is speech. But it is speech unlike any speech that has ever been before. Never before has there been speech that one could speak into a machine and alter the reality of that machine. It is far more powerful than shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater (that being an example of reasonably restricted speech) with the advent of the modern internet it seems silly to think that you can keep this powerful speech in a bottle and sell it. In many ways it is a bit like trying to put the genie back in the bottle...
Yet that's just what commerical software is all about. Bottling speech and selling it in crates. And there isn't anything wrong with that. That's what commerce is all about. Yet, things eventually become commodities and you lose that limited monopoly after a while. Just as light-bulbs are made by many companies now and some people would pause before buying a lamp that required a special light bulb.
Interestingly people buy lamps that require special bulbs... some times even bulbs that are patented and only made by one company. Some of these lamps provide brighter full-spectrum light, some provide a more pleasant shade of light. And other people find having a violet tinge in their light simply not worthy of the extra expense... and they buy lamps that take standard light bulbs.
I firmly believe that this will happen with software. And if you read the article you can garner the same points. Oracle buying OSS startups or Microsoft hiring off Distribution maintainers only causes a delay in the development of the inevitable. That delay is not without its profit margin. And the act of slowing the adoption of the OSS mind-set in the general public may be a necessary evil to allow humanity to adjust to this new powerful force on the face of the planet.
OpenSource empowers outsourcing in India and China as much as it empowers rural US and small European Universities. In time the natural market forces will shift finding a new balance in the world. Wages in India and China will equalize with those in the US. However, the rate of this shift can be controlled... I'm not sure if it is better to slow down or speed up this shift... but I know that those who are successful in today's world have an incentive to keep the world the same. Oracle and Microsoft for example did well in a world of bottled genies and they want that key to their success to stay the same. It is only natural.
OpenSource on the Internet means that someone who couldn't afford to do a thing before can now do that thing (see Nagios from the article) and leverage the talent of all the other people in the world who could not climb over that initial barrier to entry. OpenSource on the Internet means that the Software playing field is flatter. If you can get an OSS person to help you and you can afford their salary... you can do nearly the same thing as the really big companies. If the rest of your business runs well, technology need not be the biggest of your concerns.
Companies like Microsoft and Oracle have built their very lives on technology being a big concern. And all that cash they have means that they can sway the direction of technology onto paths that benefit themselves. Eventually, however, just as relationships with the light bulb maker doesn't drive the central concerns of most businesses today, neither will software in a hundred years.
In one hundred years what will matter is that this was a time of innovation that generated technology that changed the course of history. Just as pop. culture is confused about how much Edison really did to invent the light bulb and electrical grid they will also very likely decide that Bill Gates was the inventor of the Personal Computer and the Internet. With a little luck they will find it silly that we used to buy software in boxes. With even more luck they will find it a silly idea to pay for software at all and instead will have established a concept of "commissioning software" to be created by those talented in the "craft" an
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Troll or not, only three minutes passed between the posting of the original article and this response. So, either this Anonymous Coward thinks and types really, really fast, or maybe it's just more canned material from the FUD factory?
A company can buy the copyright for the source and re-release it under a different license. As long as the copyright is theirs, they can do whatever they want to do with it, except for suing anyone using a copy of the source BEFORE it was bought out (and its forks). So, a project may be forked and it will be perfectly legal.
But what if for example Sun stops releasing OpenOffice under LGPL? Something like 70% of the OpenOffice team are Sun employees. And although OpenOffice is not such a mess as the MSDOC format, it's often regarded as being difficult to mantain. Because of that, it would be easier and more appealing for many developers to put more effort in projects such as KOffice and Abiword/Gnumeric rather than forking OpenOffice.
...the GPL is the best answer when you DON'T want to get eaten up by a big corporation. If you use the GPL, then predatory criminals won't want to touch you with a ten foot pole. They might try and work the legal angle and try to bring software patents to bear on you, but that's only because of recent boneheaded legislation that was created by companies run by predatory criminals (see: Darl McBride).
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
You mention Open Office and Firefox. The relationship between these products and "open source" is mixed at best.
Open Office isn't really an Open Source project, it's a commercial product that was open-sourced after it was Gatesed to death.
Mozilla/Firefox is an odd beast. Mosaic out as semi-open-source and benefitted from the same kind of feedback as real open source products. The relationship between Netscape and Mosaic and whether "Netscape Mosaic" shared more than a name with Mosaic aside, Netscape's product was at least a reimplementaion of Mosaic, and Mozilla/Firefox is yet another reimplementation, funded at first as an upgrade for Netscape using the power of the Open Source model... and the result isn't unequivocally good.
Meanwhile, Microsoft started out with the Mosaic code base to produce Internet Explorer.
The relationship between open source products and commercial ones is complex, but theer's damn few FOSS projects that have produced top notch products that appeal to people other than the software developer crowd that haven't a goodly portion of commercial development involved.