If Oracle Bought Every Open Source Company

An anonymous reader points out Glyn Moody's thought experiment: what if Oracle bought up the entire open source ecosystem? Who would win, who would lose? And how might an open ecosystem grow in the wake of such an event? "Recently, there was an interesting rumour circulating that Oracle had a war chest of some $70 billion, and was going on an acquisition spree. Despite the huge figure, it had a certain plausibility, because Oracle is a highly successful company with deep pockets and an aggressive management. The rumour was soon denied, but suppose Oracle decided to spend, if not $70 billion, say $10 billion in an efficient way: how might it do that? One rather dramatic use of that money would be to buy up the leading open source companies — all of them."

Comments

Some areas would have no interest

[ducomputergeek]

Somehow I doubt they'd be buying up projects like Drupal, Wordpress, or Joomla. But I could see them buying up companies like Jaspersoft, Openbravo, etc. that produce enterprise grade OSS tools used for BI, ERP, etc. which does fit nicely into their business market. Although seeing Oracle in action in the past, it would likely be that they would buy then slowly let the products wither and die to they are no longer a threat to their core business.

Hmm

[buddyglass]

I've always questioned the logic of buying an open source company. What do you really get? You don't get the IP since that's open sourced anyway. You don't get the employees since they can always leave. You maybe get some customers, but then those guys can always switch to a fork of the project. Potentially a fork that's being run by the same developers responsible for the original project.

Re:Does it matter?

[Angst Badger]

It would cause a ripple for a while, like it has with MySQL, but trust me, in time - we'll have found another FOSS solution.

I'd say that Oracle's acquisition of MySQL has done a lot more than cause a ripple. If I wasn't already dependent on it, I wouldn't even consider it for future development, and I am eagerly waiting for one of the forks to a) mature, and b) develop enough of a track record to risk depending on it for the long term, or c) to settle on one or more alternatives such as Postgres and/or some of the so-called NoSQL solutions. The situation with Java isn't as bad, as Java has a base of users (and the enormous anchor of IBM's investment in Java solutions) that is orders of magnitude greater than MySQL, so the leverage Oracle can exert is greatly reduced, but it's still a concern.

Forks -- if you're going to build the necessary developer infrastructure around them and properly support and maintain them -- take time and, more often than not, money. And as a user, transitioning from one ordinary version to another is often expensive, never mind transitioning to a forked version that, more often than not, involves significant changes from the original trunk, MySQL and its descendants being a particularly illustrative example. It's not the end of the world, but it is often a very big deal.

At the end of the day, if an open source project you depend on is maintained by a for-profit company, and the project is sufficiently valuable, someone will eventually come along and buy its maintainer. And if the project is cutting into the bottom line of the buyer, as was the case with MySQL and Oracle, you can be sure that the new owner will make the change as disruptive as possible. It's a basic vulnerability that is built into the commercialization of Open Source. Whether it's a significant risk with any particular project will vary, of course, but it's always there, and the ability to fork is not a panacea.