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Oracle Wants Proof That Open Source Is Profitable
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)."
Based on Sun's financial demise I'm sure that Oracle is already aware that closed source software isn't always profitable either.
I'm curious as to why a company would spend a lot of money making something that other people will give away for free.
It had better be really special.
My experience in software houses over the last 20 years suggests that they are opposed to letting customers see their source code because then customers will know, beyond any doubt, that they have been thoroughly fleeced. If the vendor delivers binaries only, at least there's still the possibility that the code is good quality, cleverly engineered, or whatever they're convincing people to pay for.
no exaggeration and no offense here. we are the community. users, developers, evangelists etc and so on. we just make a software/framework live by developing, adding to it, supporting and using it, or we leave it and it dies.
its not our job to make it profitable for you or teach you. you are the private company that seeks to profit. its your job to find ways to profit from it without offending us. think of us as 'the people', the public.
if you upset us, we will fork something and get behind it and it will take off.
Read radical news here
They only need to look towards Red Hat. If Oracle cannot figure it out, then they need to close their doors. It is not the open source arenas responsibility to make Oracle profitable. Now if Oracle wants to hire me at oh, I dunno $500,000 a year plus perks, then I will teach them, till then they have done nothing but issue a threat.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
yes
Larry knows exactly how to make money; he is probably the world's best businessman at holding you upside-down and shaking you vigorously until your pockets empty.
I would be stunned if Oracle ever comes out with a credible OpenSolaris strategy -- it's not Oracle's way, nor is it in their best interests to have a vibrant opensolaris community. Unlike Linux, the best parts of Solaris have never come from outside Sun. Dtrace, ZFS, integrated hardware, all this stuff is where Sun's real value lay.
The end game for OpenSolaris began when Sun moved ahead with the merger. From then until the official end is just drama, positioning, etc.
"(The following message is wholly my own, and doesn't represent anything from Oracle. While I'm an Oracle employee, I have no special privileged information or insight beyond what is already common knowledge.)"
This could be a random guy stirring the pot. What do we have to actually think management might ditch opensolaris?
But both those examples show what the open source business model is. Support other peoples open source software and use it to sell complete solutions to your customers.
I mean less then 1% of the source code that Redhat supports and use are written by people paid by Redhat.
The problem for Oracle here is that they can't do the same with Solaris, because they write most of the code themself, and if they don't write it, nobody else will.
Share price means less than market cap.
Oracle - 130.25B
Red Hat - 5.87B
It is somewhat hard to pay the power bill and your employees with "benifits to society"
Open Source software is profitable in much the same way owning a parking lot for your business is profitable. It enables you to do business more cheaply and flexibly than the other options.
Open source software works great when it is not your core competency. For example, if you make hardware appliances, Linux is a great, free commodity OS you can use. Hiring some people to develop it, customize it, and fix bugs in it is much, much cheaper than writing an OS from scratch or licensing one. If you sell computing services, OSS is a great resource because it enables you to deliver those resources more cheaply and if you combine either of the two previous markets with custom hardware or software you do develop and which is your core competency, you can undercut pretty much every other business model.
I don't even know why I'm repeating this here. Literally hundreds of companies (I've worked for four myself) rely heavily on OSS development to make money and have been doing so for decades now. If the brilliant business minds at Oracle can't wrap their heads around this problem then they have bigger concerns than what to do with Sun's OSS assets... like how to fire all the idiots who somehow graduated from business school.
OSS is great way to cut your own costs by getting others to do work for you for free and make money in other markets.
So unless you can figure out how having OpenSolaris running on millions of devices everywhere ultimately translates to revenue, I doubt Oracle mgmt will be impressed.
Umm, does Oracle use OpenSolaris themselves for their workstations and servers both internally and for sale? If so, then having OpenSolaris on millions of devices means you get free bug reports and fixes for your OS from some subset of those millions of people. That's free labor.
If you don't monetize something somewhere, then it doesn't really help if OpenSolaris is used everywhere. In fact, it hurts. Because you spend more time supporting and debugging things that are not necessarily supportive of your own priorities, and are not generating revenue.
Wait you're spending time fixing bugs you don't care about and supporting the OS for free? Why? Why not just fix the bugs you do care about or which people are willing to pay you to fix and let other people handle the rest of the bugs if it bothers them? That's how Linux works, why not OpenSolaris?
Show us a plan for how that will ultimately generate revenue for Oracle?
Umm, you don't have to pay software licensing costs, you get bug reporting and work on the project from others for free, you can charge people support fees if they want you to do any work on it, if they don't want support it costs you nothing. How is this not a win? And what is your alternative? Pay Microsoft licensing fees? Drop OpenSolaris and switch to Linux then spend you money trying to port the features you need from OpenSolaris to Linux? Close source OpenSolaris and try to get people to pay you when they can just use Linux instead (or Windows or OS X)? Those are the three options I see and I'm sure your guys will do a thorough cost benefit on them all because they're not morons... right?
I just had the experience of starting up my recently upgraded copy of openoffice on my linux box and seeing an oracle logo in the startup window. Feels kind of strange, like having your mom's underwear mixed in with your girlfriend's in the laundry basket.
I realize that TFA is about OpenSolaris, but when it comes to mysql and openoffice, it's always seemed to me that the only real reason those projects received so much attention over the last decade was that they got there first-est with the most-est. It's not like mysql is the only OSS database on the market, or the best technically. When it comes to openoffice, I'm getting kind of tired of having to apologize for it. It just isn't a very good office suite in terms of usability, quality, or features. And it's an infamously unhealthy OSS project in terms of the ugliness of the codebase and the lack of success in working with developers outside Sun/Oracle.
So maybe it's a good thing that Oracle bought Sun, because it will allow the OSS community to step back and reassess their focus. Competition is good. It's not healthy that the OSS world has drifted into a near-monoculture of mysql and openoffice.
Find free books.
The problem here isn't that open source isn't profitable, it's that it isn't Oracle profitable. Oracle is the essential part of the problem here, and to answer directly is to miss the point.
We solve this not by huffing and wheezing about how great open source software is. We solve it by proving that we don't need closed source software, that giants like Oracle are unnecessary and useless. We solve it by using PostgreSQL and MySQL, by using Linux (and maybe Open Solaris). We solve it by publicly mocking anyone who spent the money on Oracle, finding security holes in Oracle, and generally making it unpleasant to be an Oracle customer, which won't be hard because of the great head start Oracle has on that.
We don't have to justify our existence or our way of doing business; they do. And they're doing a great job of pissing off their loyalists. IBM was once this proud. Look at them now. The same thing can happen here, we just have to refuse to put up with it.
Yes, open source software is very profitable for IBM to get you in the door so they can get you to upgrade to their closed-source systems later on
It's a strategy that makes open source profitable. Either you sell support, or you sell a value added proprietary version.
If they are open source (and GPL licensed), the worse that could happen is they cease to code for it and turn the rest of the developers to other projects. The open source portion could then be forked and taken over by others who see the value Oracle missed. Obviously it presumes GPLd code which isn't probably the case here.
Unfortunately, that will be a big bleed for those projects because, when under Sun, there were people hired, paid and on payroll (with benefits and all the nine yards) for working on those projects (which they did full-time and more.)
The possibility of losing that kind of man-hour man power is a biggie for an open source project.
Consider how msft works. One msft product makes it necessary, or at least expedient, to get another msft product. To run the latest ms-office, you need ms-windows. To get all the features out of Outlook, you have to have Exchange. You can load certain websites without msie, which means you need windows. Why do you think msft is desperate to lock everybody into OOXML? Msft has always followed the strategy: "control the standard, and the money will follow."
Stop important F/OSS projects, and you hurt F/OSS. Maybe more people will use windows-server, and maybe ms-sql will run better on windows-server than oracle.
Why do you think Google and IBM support F/OSS so strongly? It's a standard than can, to some extent, keep Microsoft from having an even stronger monopoly.
For my company, one acronym: ZFS. We're going to start clocking into petabytes of storage within a year, and right now we're handling the tens of terabytes of storage under Solaris with a basic support contract so I could pick up the patch updates and email with the odd, once-a-year problem I couldn't solve myself. I'm shudder to think of the supporting the same scale with any other filesystem; ZFS has seriously saved our asses several times now with just its scrubbing feature.
Oracle's new licensing policy has now put us into a bind. We now have to pick up Oracle Sun-branded hardware, plus the hardware support contract, plus the Oracle Premium software service plan. Then re-integrate the hardware with our existing configuration, possibly picking up new controller cards. Our carrying costs per year for choosing a Solaris-based solution just jumped an order of magnitude.
The only reason we haven't started planning a move to FreeBSD 8.x is because FreeBSD ZFS doesn't yet support iSCSI (because FreeBSD doesn't have an iSCSI target yet). ZFS just got hella more expensive.
Considering Apple's silent dropping of ZFS, I take it as a sign that in the future ZFS development will likely clam up to just Oracle Sun Solaris. Thus, we're going to follow Apple's lead and start testing ext4 under Linux (we first came to ZFS from ext3). I like ZFS, but not enough to justify a 10X cost difference unless there is simply no other way to hold petabytes off a single server.