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Is Getting Acquired Good For FOSS Projects?
ruphus13 writes "While open source companies are legion, their acquisitions by proprietary source companies may cause concern for the viability of projects. Can a FOSS project 'survive' an acquisition? According to the article posing that question: 'One has to ask, though, how healthy it is for increasingly important open-source platforms and applications to come under the wing of huge, proprietary software companies. Probably the best example to cite on that topic is the ongoing car crash that is Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems...Sun Micrososytems is one of only three big, US public companies focused almost entirely on open source. If it gets swallowed up, that will leave just Red Hat and Novell. Open-source pundits are predicting that small, promising open-source players will be snapped up by bigger fish this year. And Google's relationship to Android gets ever murkier as it sinks its commercial hooks deeper into the platform, billing its own offerings as superphones relative to other Android phones.'"
How does a firm "acquire" an OSS project? Look at mysql, All Sun did was pay money for a name, bunch of workers and a customer list, not the actual IP, cause that was open sourced to begin with.
In short, if a company "acquires" (whatever that means in this context) an OSS project, and you're not happy with how things are being done, fork the project and be on your way, Otherwise learn to drink the coolade like everyone else.
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but doesn't IBM put a lot of focus on developing and promoting open source? And last i checked they're a bigger company than Sun and Novell combined. As for Novell, who takes their open source work seriously in light of their ties with Microsoft and the associated legal landmine?
>> And Google's relationship to Android gets ever murkier as it sinks its commercial hooks deeper into the platform, billing its own offerings as superphones relative to other Android phones.'
Wow! Apple fanbois anyone?
"And Google's relationship to Android gets ever murkier as it sinks its commercial hooks deeper into the platform"
Huh? They own it and made the vast vast majority of it, feel free to fork, that's what OSS is.... dunno how they could possibly be 'sinking its hooks' into the platform when it is their baby from the start... Be happy they have released source...
If by "good" you mean "good because it ceases to be a FOSS project," then yeah.
Open source is a concept where people get together write code to solve a common problem they have... they understand that they will not directly profit from the coding, although they may be seen as experts in whatever area their project is in, and they can then profit selling hardware, consulting on implementations, and other things.
If a company hires away all the programmers and then have them do something else so they don't contribute anymore, the project either is frozen, or new developers fork the project away from the original developers and the project moves on...
The agenda of this seems to be "omg big companies are the devil" nonsense. why must this be seen as a threat to OSS? because stallman says so? one of the biggest fails of open source is it's lack of reliable support or response to customer deamnds, if more big names jump on board an throw money at developers it'll only help OSS.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
More on this breaking news story at 10...
But seriously, of course open-source contributions from for-profit organizations are going to come with strings attached. Whether this is in the form of it serving their own needs or if it's more of a PR exercise or whether they plan to directly monetize their contributions there's always a business reason for the choice (At least when it comes to successful businesses - I'm sure there's some small altruistic ones). But they are also going to be contributing, and typically when a business gets behind an open-source project like these they bring a level of resources that can be hard to get purely from the community.
Are the contributions worth the strings? Well... the beauty of open-source is that if you don't think it is you can always fork the project. The only thing that the "owner" of an open-source project really owns is the name/brand, the rest is owned by everybody. If they're really screwing it up with their business interests then surely you can get the support to start a branch of the product (Like the Open Android Alliance mentioned in TFA - they wanted to provide open-source non-proprietary alternatives to Google's android offerings so they just went and started doing it). The simple fact is in a capitalist world if contributing doesn't benefit businesses then they won't contribute, and in some cases we simply wouldn't have the related open-source product or it would be a mere shadow of what it has become with their support.
Is IBM no longer a big US company?
I believe that their focus on open source is at least as substantial as Sun's every was.
I really can't believe this FUD is taking hold. So what if a company funds an open source project?
If they do something nasty, fork the project. If nobody can be arsed to fork it then it clearly wasn't such a big deal. There's NO downside here. If they stop funding development completely it's still better than never funding it at all.
I agree it's an interesting question: how do open-source projects fare when acquired by companies that mainly focus on proprietary software?
But the article doesn't usefully attempt to answer that question. It doesn't survey major projects that have been thus acquired, giving us details on the pros and cons each encountered, how many flourished, failed, stagnated, or were unaffected, etc. It doesn't try to figure out what the reasons for success or failure might be. It doesn't really do any analysis.
It just asks the question, rambles on a bit, cites the one single example of MySQL's role in the Oracle acquisition (which hasn't even happened yet), and then we're done. Boring.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There is a natural ebb and flow to this driven by market forces. The value system is primarily driven by users of the open projects. If Oracle abuses mySQL enough then it will be forked by natural and unstoppable force. I'm not worried at all.
An OSS project is only in danger if there is project is backed only by commercial companies. OSS projects driven by a community and backed by some foundation (e.g. Zope foundation, Plone foundation, Python foundation) are unlikely in such a danger.
If someone aquires your project, it's "good" - if the primary goal is recognition for your work.
If someone aquires your company, it's "good", in the traditional American Capitalist sense - if recognition and profit are your goals.
I have known and worked for companies whose primary goal was to be aquired. Become profitable or successful in your own right, and let the reflection of your moral values tell you "good" or "bad".
What does it mean when someone is "legion"? Go Slashdot quality!
echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:" net@madduck
Well, I shouldn't say die. I *DO* wish that it'd conform a bit more with the SQL standard though.
Now donning my flame-retardant suit.
Under Sun Microsystems, a company that was having a hard time making a profit, open source projects fared badly. Staff were cut across the company, including administrative, QA and lab support staff. When all the support staff go, the software developers gets loaded down with all that extra non-development work and they'll eventually leave too, no matter how "nice" or "friendly" the company is to open source. An attitude like "let's open source now and figure out how to make money later" is a recipe for failure.
Under Oracle, things may or may not fare better. It depends if Oracle can come up with a way to make money off of support, services and add-ons for open source. If they do, then they'll continue to invest and the OSS will do well (as it did with Oracle's acquisition of Sleepycat / Berkeley DB). If they don't, then the project may not fare well (as some claim happened with InnoDB). I know some OSS fans find a way to get a foundation or edu paycheck, but those are few and far between. I like a corporate paycheck and that means there has to be a way to make money from OSS or I won't get paid to work on it. There is ample proof that OSS development can be profitable as RedHat shows, but there needs to be a business plan to pay for ongoing development.
Frankly, I'm more concerned by the loss of key Mozilla NSS developer time due to the Oracle acquisition than I am concerned about MySQL's future. Any ideas on a business plan to make money from NSS out there?
Digital sold RDB to Oracle, I suppose, about 15 years ago now. From that date you couldn't really buy RDB anymore. The value of RDB to Digital was the amount of money anybody would pay them to kill it. The same goes for OSS. If you develop a nice tool which competes with a commercial product, somebody may pay you to make it go away.
Is that good for a FOSS project? Depends on your POV. It could be very good for the copyright holders and their accountants, lawyers, ex wives, etc.
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Yeah, who needs compilers that make the best code they can, phones that don't crash and know what year it is? Who needs free software when you can patent software licensing itself?
Let us instead ignore the freedom of the platform and look at the Oooh shiny.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Nokia aquired QT about a year ago, and Nokia has added more free licenses (LGPL). I think that Nokia has done a tremendous job keeping QT free. It's available under the LGPL now; the most recent release, 4.6, saw the first community submissions. They are also a "KDE Patron."
Nokia does open source right.
I've been struggling lately to understand why I should believe that Open Source projects are a good thing for a business that wants to profit, and also for a talented developer (such as myself) that wants to make some money in his career. From a company point of view, when you decide to market a product that's based on open source, it would seem that you're saying - my company isn't going to provide value based in software that any other company can't deliver. I see this as leading to products that rely on support contracts and a strong sales force in order to be profitable. Is this really a winning idea? What ever happened to the idea of building a product that is successful because it's simply better than the competition's product? I can't help but see open source as a path to mediocrity. Along the lines of the article - why would a large company buy a small company that has it's technology based in open source? What do you gain by paying for something that you already get for free? As a talented developer, I see open source as a bad thing - it reduces the value of a developer. Writing good software is hard - not a lot of people can do it. Again, why does a company want to pay for top notch developers when that same developer can contribute to it's products while someone else foots the bill? If an open source product is a companies bread and butter, and the strategy is to make money off of support contracts, well doesn't a developer just become more or less a bug fixer? In that world, if success is based upon who gives the best support, a developer is really support for support. I always thought I'd make a buck in this business because I consider myself a superior engineer, and I'd take that skill and use it to help a company create a product that other people don't have the skills to create. In short, I can't help but see open source as something that devalues software engineers. Tell me why I'm wrong. Explain why other professions don't go out of their way to make the product of their hard work 'free'.
It cuts both ways. It's both good and bad. Yes, corporate ownership is a great thing, and it speaks well that companies such as IBM, Sun, Google, and Oracle show interest in open source. It may help suit and tie wearers to understand that open source != hobby quality software. But on the down side, if big company decides that it's roadmap for former open source project is where it's going, regardless of the desires of the users, well it could sour people on the product pretty quick. Even though it's open source still, the product could be forced don a path it's users don't want. Replace the community with a pair of corporate blinders and it's a problem. Sure you can fork and all that jazz. Nothing is the end really, but corporate acquisition can be a boon or a thorn for people that just want to use a product. Depending on the product, your user base may be mostly "users" anyway. I'm no expert, but I'd imagine *successfully* forking something like MySQL isn't something you could just do overnight. There's way more to forking than just checking in the code.
Novell, who had Microsoft sell their distro on the premise that Microsoft owned hunks of Linux is one of the last bastions of Open Source? Google gives lots of code away and sponsors events to get student developers to cut their teeth writing for Open Source projects, and it's scary that they're big bad proprietary guys getting their "commercial hooks deeper into" their own invention? And somehow the article title is the name of a Rod Stewart song about people judging the town tramp?!?!?!?!?!? Jeesh. Things are murky enough without this guy trying to make it worse in hopes you keep coming back for the part where he sorts it all out for you.
Finally modding someone offtopic when they rant about what "Begging the Question" means: priceless.
Let's look for a company outside the usual group that's active in open source not for altruistic reasons, but for basic capitalistic reasons. We need look no further than HTC. They make a lot of these Android devices, including Droid and Nexus One. Their market capitalization today is $282B. They're bigger than Microsoft or Apple or HP or IBM. They don't have to care about these little squabbles and they don't.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Open source is a process where I write code to scratch my itch and out of the generousness of my heart set my code for itch scratching free for use and modification by others. Other people have a similar itch to mine, but not quite the same - and adapt my code to their needs. In time when my itch has erupted into full blown psoriasis I find they've turned my itch scratcher into a cure and so I get in the end the benefit not just of my own effort but also of theirs.
If from experience I can predict the outcome from my own contribution I'm not even being generous -- I'm being as greedy as I can be by leveraging the power of a global network of thinkers to solve my problems present and future, for free.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So, Trolltech was acquired by Nokia, but, IIRC, Trolltech has a kind of licence for QT that contains something dramatically labelled a "poison clause", or something like that. It's designed to prevent ever changing the license to a proprietary one, thereby closing the code. I'm not sure how it's done, but this blog post may be related.
Other projects include Xen virtual software (where the parent company, Xensource, was bought by Citrix.) It was very exciting for a while there, but I'm seeing the leading edge Linux users turn to KVM and the corporate users stick with VMWare, not realizing the problems of the server hardware and VMWare's ancient 2.4 kernel. I'm not sure why: I've not had the opportunity to do side-by-side comparisons with the latest versions of all of them.
The Amanda backup software has been taken up by Zmanda, who have apparently destabilized it in the midst of trying to add glitzy GUI's to it which they sell only as corporate add-ons and which have caused two companies I know to throw it out, not because the Amanda was not fast and functional, but because the admins handed the backup management couldn't figure out the GUI and configure things properly.
I can see your point, but there are two separate angles you must consider.
A developer needs to stand out, and prove himself. A contribution to an Open Source project creates credibility because not every code makes it into production, and the fact that you are confident of your skills to open up what you write helps too. So it doesn't DIRECTLY make you money, it contributes to you snagging a better job or work order - it strengthens your negotiations. It goes further, however, when you employed and know about Open Source, see next angle.
A company needs to operate as efficient as possible. For this it needs software. Software is never *just right*, it needs adapting - which means development work. Let's take CMS as an example: you can spend budget X on a proprietary solution, or you can spend part of it on an Open Source CMS and then PAY THE DEVELOPERS or other people involved to add the bits you need for your own company. The clever thing is then to push the changes back out to teh community because that gives you also marketing capital, but even if you don't you will get EXACTLY what you need for your own specific business, and still come in under the cost of proprietary solutions.
However, the original question was why a company wants to outright buy a FOSS product, and I must admit I'm a bit at a loss there. It could be to gain complete control (thus losing the community benefits, which is what I see happening with Zimbra) and sell proprietary versions - I don't like that approach because that's really taking advantage of the work of others, or to actually take it off the market, which is what I see happening with MySQL to great chagrin of banks. AFAIK, quite a lot of trading setups use MySQL because it's light and fast, it appears Postgresql cannot handle the large volume (that's what I was told, I'm no DB expert or coder). OpenOffice came to be because SUN wanted to harm MS's revenue base, another argument.
So, I can see developer and company benefit to using FOSS, less so to buy a whole project..
Insert
The real question, how "open" is an open source project?
If the code is one big spaghetti soup and there's virtually no documentation, then I'd say the project isn't really "open", and the "forkability" of the project is close to zero, as new developers aren't likely to pick up the project once its original developers get bought away... instead, in that case, it's more likely that new developers will stand up and write something new from scratch, although that may take a while of course.
On the other hand, if the code is structured well, with good documentation (not a machine-generated function-by-function reference, but also documentation on the conceptual level), where the documentation has been made commentable by the community, etc. etc., then such a project is much more viable.
Actually, I think someone should stand up and write some guidelines for good open-source projects to follow, and such guidelines can then also be used to rate open-source projects. Perhaps this is an idea for meta-sites such as freshmeat, sourceforge, googlecode, etc. (?)
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Microsoft took one of your bug reports seriously?
Look at the state of IE. There's a huge pile of WONTFIX.
you had me at #!