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Oracle Wants Proof That Open Source Is Profitable

Posted by Soulskill on from the show-me-the-money dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Since Oracle's acquisition of Sun, all open source projects that now have Oracle as their primary sponsor are worried about their future, and FUD is spreading quickly. Very few public statements have been made by Oracle executives, particularly regarding OpenSolaris. The community is arguing about the difficulties of forking the code base when most (if not all) of the developers are employed by Oracle. Now Oracle wants the community to prove that open source can be made profitable. What arguments can the Slashdot crowd provide to convince Oracle about that?" Reader greg1104 tips related news about licenses for Solaris. According to an account manager, "Solaris support now comes through a contract on the hardware (Oracle SUN hardware)."

4 of 393 comments (clear)

  1. IBM by Jaysyn · · Score: 5, Informative

    IBM & Red Hat are profitable, right?

    --
    There is a war going on for your mind.
  2. Services by gmuslera · · Score: 5, Informative

    Open source by itself is not profitable. But services around it surely are.

  3. Not from FOSS by AnonymousClown · · Score: 5, Informative
    IBM sells many different services and hardware which the FOSS operations augment. That wasn't the case with OpenSolaris.

    RedHat, is a Linux corporate support company that was the first and so far as I know the only company that's making money doing that. Although, almost half of RedHat's income is from financial activities. In other words, they're not making all their money from FOSS.

    So, there hasn't been a business model based upon FOSS that's really been proven - completely.

    Yeah, yeah, yeah, FUD blah blah blah. But just brushing off criticisms as FUD doesn't cut it to the accountants, I'm afraid.

    --
    RIP America

    July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001

  4. Clarifications (I'm the quoted source) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ok, so I'm the author of that message that is quoted in the article. And while an employee, I was *not* speaking for Oracle. I didn't use an Oracle e-mail account, or a Sun account for that matter.

    I am not authorized to speak for Oracle. So please make sure attributions are correct.

    Also, most of the posters here are confused due to lack of sufficient context. I was talking about Open Development (where anyone can integrate changes and participate in design, etc.) -- not Open Source. Open Source is clearly a win for everyone involved, I think. I'm personally less convinced that Open Development is a win for Open Solaris. There are lots of people using it, but almost nobody contributing, and the contributions are expensive to support.

    Oh yeah, and in case anyone thinks I don't know what I'm talking about -- have a look at https://www.ohloh.net/p/opensolaris/contributors -- that would be my name at the top of list. And yes, I integrate changes for other people in the community as well, but those numbers are mostly not part of the ohloh statistics.