Slashdot Mirror
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.
IBM & Red Hat are profitable, right?
There is a war going on for your mind.
Redhat does pretty good for itself, doesn't it?
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
...who read Oprah instead of Oracle?!
You and the four other female readers of slashdot.
Deities please bless and send us more lady geeks.
Loose lips lose spit.
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.
Open source by itself is not profitable. But services around it surely are.
I don't have to pay for it...
"(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?
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
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.
Up your font size.
Ch3ap VeRd@na! Do you want a bigger font size? Imprezz Hur! Send your credit card info! Only $49.95!
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.
It is indeed. Companies that support open source projects make money in other venues, often supported at their base by the very non-profit open source that they support.
Other companies buy up projects to kill them. After all, it's also hard to pay employees for your very expensive database when a more-or-less free one does a more-or-less good job.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
What is IBM making money on, the open source software or the hardware it runs on and supporting same?
Yes.
IBM makes money by selling the hardware that runs your open source software.
IBM makes money by deploying the hardware, and the open source software.
IBM makes money by upselling the open source software with proprietary versions (Apache -> Websphere, Jazz -> Rational Team Concert, ...)
IBM makes money by selling entirely new applications based on open source frameworks (nearly anything based on Eclipse).
Oracle can sell their new hardware to run OSS. They can sell services to help deploy said hardware and OSS. They can sell their own versions of apps to complement OSS. They can use OSS to complement their proprietary apps (e.g., getting wikimedia to run on Oracle, though that might be a bad idea, I'm giving it as an example of the concept). Seriously, can't they just look at their competition to see what they're doing?
Companies that support open source projects make money in other venues, often supported at their base by the very non-profit open source that they support.
I can see how one could sell support contracts for certain kinds of software like MySQL and Solaris. But not all categories of free software are as amenable to support contracts. Examples include computer games that aren't massively multiplayer.
Other companies buy up projects to kill them.
Oracle may be planning to do this to MySQL, which was largely developed within the MySQL AB cathedral that Oracle acquired. On the other hand, PostgreSQL's major contributors are too diverse in organizational affiliation for this to be an easy job for Oracle.
Oracle has a unique business model for being one of the two biggest software companies in the world -- you can download most of their core products easily and try them out at no cost. Some of the products are flat out free (JDeveloper, Oracle SQL Developer). When you license them, it's not because they are limpware, that they are expired, or need a serial number... because they don't. The incentive is primarily for purchase of security updates and support. This is completely Unlike the other big software company, which doesn't allow downloads, no try before you buy, have to use serial numbers, restrict upgrade paths, and install phone-home services to keep them aware of who is running legit copies of their software and who isn't.
The thing is, this topic seems to be more about what to do with Solaris. Oracle used to use Solaris as their tier 1 development platform in the 90's, then turned to Linux years ago. Now that they're in deep with both, which open source *nix OS do they focus on? Is there any value in Solaris over Linux? They know that Linux is both open source and is profitable (Red Hat). Oracle knows there is money in open source software or they wouldn't have purchased MySQL properties, attempted to purchase JBoss, even thrown around talks with a Red Hat acquisitionetc. This may be more about trying to figure out how to focus so they can supply turn-key servers to their customers rather than general "is oss profitable."
At this point what's to tell Oracle that Solaris is better than Linux, because, I'm not sure they're convinced?
MYSQL saves us a ton of money.
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
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.
Last year when the Oracle's contract had not been finalized, we chose PostgreSQL over MySQL and this kinds of doubts that Oracle will be proper place for projects like MySQL was one of the reasons. It seems Oracle has indeed problem adapting the new approaches required for working on Free Software projects.
Be like shadow in the light or darkness.KMZ
This is a very hard argument for numerous companies, not just Oracle. If the answer was simple, then Linux on the desktop would be much more prevalent. Instead we see it hidden away in the Server rooms happily consuming Microsoft's market share.
Profit models are always based on software sales with a percentage cap. As an example, a CAD support company will sell you AutoCad. They pay $400 US to Autodesk, and charge the customer $600 US. Sure, many companies offer support, but in the application space it's not easy to make money. How hard is it for a Windows power user to install a Windows application on their own? In reality, it's not difficult so most companies have minimum installation support. They can count on each year receiving a check for the latest version of AutoCad. Even if the company pays for installation service one year, there is no assurance that the customer will pay again for the services.
Some companies have "Managed Service Models", where you don't have to pay the 600 bucks for AutoCad. Instead you lease the seat with support for a fixed rate. This is closer to where you want to go since it covers both guaranteed software sales, and guaranteed support staff payments. Even still, these are pretty limited since most companies can not see much benefit in paying a company a large monthly rate for something one of their power users can handle. You also run into numerous issues where power users convince the people they work for (and rightly so) that it's a waste of money to use the managed service model. This could increase their pay, and add stability to their job (pretty important in this economy).
Where companies like IBM and RedHat make their money from OSS is a much lower level of Managed Services. When you can package the app, package the OS, security, patching, infrastructure to support everything, and have a knowledge base able to reduce down time companies see much more benefit. They can also cater lower cost services to companies with lower budgets. It's cheaper to get a start up moving with RedHat Cluster, Apache and MySql than it is an equivalent Oracle package. IBM and RedHat can not only show you the benefit, but will help you implement it.
This is where Oracle needs a different mind set, which I doubt will happen. Oracle does Oracle. They don't want to support SunOne, MySQL, or Netscape Products. They want customers to pay for Oracle Directory Server, not get SunOne for free. They want customers to pay for Oracle DB, not use MySQL. They want customers to use Oracle Web server, not the SunOne products or other proven free software.
The big bucks revenue that Oracle receives each year from contracts like Oracle Apps, Oracle DB, Oracle Identity Manager, etc.. comes from huge players with tons of cash to spend. Small companies don't have the budgets to pay for Oracle, and Oracle has traditionally had an attitude where they don't want to deal with small budgets. I have seen Oracle Sales reps laugh at customers with small budgets, or just completely blow them off and ignore them.
As long as Oracle has the mind set that they should make a mint off of every deal, there is nothing anyone can do to show them OSS is profitable. Profit to them is a relative term.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.