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IBM to Oracle - You Can't Buy Open Source

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hee dept.

mrops writes "CNET has up a short article about IBM's reaction to Oracle's recent acquisitions. From the article: 'Handy was responding to comments made by Oracle CEO Ellison to the Financial Times, where he said that he wanted Oracle to control a 'full stack' of software, including the Linux operating system. If Oracle did try to buy a Linux distributor, such as Red Hat or Novell, Handy said 'we'd stick to our strategy of having two or more independent distributors and have to wait and see what happens.'" It should be pointed out, as noted in yesterday's Slashback, that Ellison has no intentions of purchasing Red Hat.

8 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Headline makes the wrong assumption by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oracle doesn't want to buy Open Source, they want to buy installed bases.

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  2. Why not? by RingDev · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why can't a company buy an open source project? Bring the developers on board, retain controlling rights, enforce licensing, etc... All OS means is that the code is published. Contrary to (supposed) popular believe, software, in and of itself, has no desire to be 'free.'

    -Rick

    --
    "Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
    1. Re:Why not? by tdvaughan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      One of the most important factors to an Open Source project's success is the community around it. Piss off the community and the project will be forked. Bug reports, feature requests, forums and mailing lists will dry up or dissolve into flamewars while the forked project takes developer interest away and eventually becomes incompatible with the original.

    2. Re:Why not? by rthille · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If it is GPL, but the copyright is retained by a small number of people who are willing to sell their rights to it, then it can be taken closed-source. Of course, anyone can fork from the last GPL'd version. That's essentially what happened with SSH if I understand that correctly.

      --
      Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
    3. Re:Why not? by Cyclops · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Contrary to (supposed) popular believe, software, in and of itself, has no desire to be 'free.'
      Software has no desire. Software is a set of specific rules that results in a specific and predictable effect. The code of such software, as was written, is covered by copyright, and software has copyright licenses.

      Free Software, contrary to what you seem to believe, is about providing users with certain freedoms:
      0. the freedom to run the program for any purpose
      1. the freedom to study the program and modify it according to your needs
      2. the freedom to distribute copies
      3. the freedom to publish modified versions

      So who has desire for theses Freedoms? Software? Don't be laughable. It's PEOPLE who desire it!

      Any software license that removes theses freedoms from users is disrespecting them. It's a license written with control in mind. Control of the user and what he may or may not be able to do.

      I for one, only use Free Software (for quite a long time, now), but in the beggining I thought only the quality of "open source" mattered. Then I learned better...
  3. Re:Oracle, IBM need to improve install and daemon by jobsagoodun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not true

    I've scripted (without GUI) installation of DB2, Websphere & Orrible no problemo just by reading the fine manual. You could too.

  4. Re:Oracle buys IBM by the_womble · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well its not unknown for companies to buy bigger ones, but that happens when the management of the bigger company are screwing up so badly that shareholders are willing to sell for shares in the new combined business.

    Buying something like Oracle would also not fit in with IBM's strategy of expanding services - their last big acquisition was a consultancy, and I bet their next one will be as well.

  5. IBM is right by thbb · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The point of IBM, which seems inescapable, is that any software that has been released as OSS can't be reverted back to an non-OSS business model: as some version of the source and some user base exist on the market, any company with IBM's-like muscle can branch a free version and make it evolve anytime they want.

    This follows the predicate: Any useful software is bound to become free (as in beer) once the cost of its development has been amortized. The free (as in speech) software movement is not much more than the social expression of this basic economical fact. Some still imperfect demonstration.