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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.'"
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"
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...
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....
Sun owns the copyright to the MySQL code. They also own the MySQL documentation, which makes Monty whine like a bitch because he can't use it for his own project.
MySQL was careful to maintain copyright over the entire MySQL codebase, so Sun did, in fact, purchase the 'IP'.
The wording of the GPL is such that they can't take it back or whatever, but Oracle could continue to support proprietary versions and stop releasing updates to the GPL version (leaving the community to support themselves starting from the most up to date GPL release from MySQL/Sun/Oracle).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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
Perhaps they could, but aren't examples like the kernel, mysql etc proof that open source endeavors are just as capable in providing "proprietary quality" products as closed houses are.
Only if you ignore the fact that MySQL was funding it's development by selling licenses for it's proprietary version.
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.
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.
That doesn't make MySQL a good example of FOSS and large corporations. Sun acquired the copyright, but since the license is GPL, Sun/Oracle cannot eliminate the open source version -- they can only compete with it. (How different is that, really, than before?)
What is happening with FOSS in huge corporations?
Firefox, mozilla.org, and Google - seem like a fairly successful combination, maybe not the leading browser today, but the browser marketplace is much, much healthier now than when IE6 was released. I think Firefox played a huge role in the changing browser market.
Google's other FOSS products - I think Google is trying too hard. They're playing with fire like mobile devices, which does benefit search (their main engine of profit) but puts them in really hard situations, like trying to create an open handset but still be friends with the mobile industry (who react to openness like it is deadly poison). They're following Apple here - who uses OS X on the iPhone and the desktop, and Google has a long way to go to catch up. TFA says Google is sinking their hooks into Android, but paradoxically, that should be impossible with a truly open platform. Yes, Google doesn't want you to root your phone - but the ability to hack a device when you have total control over it has proven to be doable despite Apple's much greater efforts. I don't think Google will go anywhere near Apple's penchant for lock-down.
IBM - IBM may have a better big business approach to FOSS: they jumped right in with a business model that applied open source software to increase their capabilities, but they keep a tight grip on their profit centers. They are a huge help with the threat of Patent wars, but they are doing so from the brilliant position of leveraging their profitable patents to help open source. At the end of the day, IBM keeps their patents, and open source keeps its source code. Only Microsoft loses.
Sun's other FOSS products - Java, OpenOffice, and VirtualBox are all very important open source products. What will happen to them? If Oracle finishes gobbling Sun up and they languish, does that mean GPL software is incompatible with big business? This hypothetical situation is not very likely, IMO. Oracle's not going to destroy value.
Well, maybe I'm wrong on that one. Maybe Sun and Oracle (and Monty too) will end up destroying something valuable. I think that's a reasonable conclusion:
Monty sold MySQL to Sun -- probably not thinking long term -- and Sun snatched MySQL up for a huge sum -- probably not thinking long term -- and now Sun is on the ropes, and Oracle is trying to buy what's left of it before all the customers slip away. Is Oracle thinking long term? Personally, I doubt it. They're probably maximizing shareholder value in the next 6 months. The values that made MySQL -- the community esprit de corps -- is being destroyed, but Oracle might end up owning the Sun logo (ooh, shiny) by the end of the year. Overall, value gets destroyed by shareholder shenanigans.
I'm just restating poorly what Dana Blankenhorn says. (He's the inspiration for TFA.)
This wouldn't be the first time sociopathic CxO's driven wild with greed ignored the community and got wiped out. Capitalism works poorly, but it still seems to be working. Don't blame Open Source for Big Business's biggest problems!
That market cap isn't in US $ - it's presumable Taiwanese New Dollars. So that would be $8.8B in US dollars. Still big but HTC clearly isn't bigger than IBM and Microsoft.
"Or if there's an open-source clone of your company's software, surely there's nothing stopping your company from, er, competing with it?"
Writing a copy of something is easy. Creating something new and original is hard. Any decent programmer can write a Tetris clone in under a day, yet the original probably took a much longer time to think up, prototype, design etc.
Same with other FOSS knockoffs (like Frozen Bubble) - the hard work has been done, all you need to do is make a copy of the working commercial version and you have some freedom at a fraction of the effort required by the original developer.
Make your own unique software, sure, but don't pretend ripping someone off is somehow fair competition. Come up with your own ideas - as all your free clone will do is kill the original development and thus cause the project to stagnate as there will be no more reference designs to copy.
It's the FOSS version of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
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.