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.'"

Comments

What does "Acquire" mean?

[xquark]

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.

Re:What does "Acquire" mean?

[maxume]

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).

Re:What does "Acquire" mean?

[Lunix Nutcase]

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.

Re:What does "Acquire" mean?

[mysidia]

Indeed... not only would there be a fork, but Oracle's version would probably be obsolete soon.

And since the fork would have code not owned by Oracle, they would no longer be able to sell commercial licenses to the GPL'ed product, or pick up the enhancements, without giving up on proprietary versions and commercial licenses, forever...

Re:What does "Acquire" mean?

[dch24]

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!

correct me if i'm wrong, but...

[yanyan]

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?

Errmmm

[Idiomatick]

"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...

please tell us your real agenda.

[timmarhy]

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.

Re:please tell us your real agenda.

[Angst Badger]

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.

Right, because big companies are famous for the reliable support they provide and their responsiveness to customer demands. Seriously, have you ever tried to get actual customer support from a large company? What's the last large company that implemented a feature you wanted? Or merged a patch you wrote for the feature you wanted into the trunk?

This is like the old argument that private corporations are inherently more efficient than government, a point of view that must originate from people who have never in their lives been involved in a large private corporation. Both big business and government are grossly inefficient because they are large enough that individual initiative and responsibility disappear.

It's not Stallman's words that are being obeyed blindly here, it's Eric S. Raymond's words. For reasons known only to ESR and God, he decided that the metric of success for "Open Source" was corporate adoption and competing with corporate products. Stallman's Free Software ideology, for all of its occasional hidebound rigidity, had user freedom and choice as its metric for success. Free Software is a huge success insofar as we, as users (and developers) have an embarrassment of riches as far as freedom and choice go. Open Source, on the other hand, is pretty consistently seeing its big successes increasingly menaced by the corporate players its advocates went out of their way to provoke. And in that arena, it's not choice, freedom, or even product quality that counts, it's money, and you can safely assume that even relatively minor transnational corporations have more money to throw around than any Open Source initiative ever will.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. The same applies to marketshare.

I missed the memo about IBM

[lordlod]

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.

disappointingly useless article

[Trepidity]

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.

I wouldn't mind...

[IANAAC]

I wouldn't mind seeing MySQL die.

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.

QT and Nokia

[fandingo]

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.

Re:QT and Nokia

[MichaelSmith]

I suppose it is generally good for an OSS product to be acquired by a natural consumer of the product, but not by a competitor.