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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."
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.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Then you'd get $10 Billion dollars worth of Forks starting off the last release, and everything would be the same as usual, except that Oracle would have acquired a lot of software.
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. The same thing would happen elsewhere.
Because of that, it would be very difficult for Oracle to monetize their purchases. Certainly to the degree that made any sort of financial sense and maybe not to the satisfaction of the shareholders.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
We'll start the bidding at -$5.00
(Yes, you pay us to take you over)
Then the programmers of the open source software projects will finally get a decent payday without some prick forking their code and diluting their potential customer/profit pool so he/she can't make a living. And then having the mother forker fucking up the code and giving them both a bad name. Then the OSS developer will be able to afford to fork the original and enhance the original to really make a quality product that can be sold and used until another prick forks his/her work and dilutes the potential customer/profit base. Or perhaps until Oracle decides to use and enhance the original.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Buying "all" open source companies would be a bit over-dramatic, but I could see perhaps a few strategic buys. For instance, buying RedHat. Oracle has their own respin of RHEL, but rather than being at the mercy of the release schedule a la CentOS, buying RH would give them more control over the pace of things, not to mention getting a lot of major contributors on the books. RedHat also owns JBoss, which might be worth their time and money to acquire, too. I doubt that it'd happen though, which is probably a good thing.
... everyone would start developing opensource.
Oracle can only really effectively buy open-source companies of the MySQL variety: where the vast majority of development is done by one, medium-sized, for-profit company closely associated with the project. Stretching a little more, they can buy multi-project companies on the lower end of "large" that do a lot of open-source development, like Sun.
But a lot of open-source is done by groups that deviate to either side of that. Either they're more distributed open-source projects with no central entity to buy in the first place, or they're run by very large companies that Oracle couldn't possibly buy, like Google and IBM.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
What if squirrels had wings and shot cruise missiles out of their tail? That's about as grounded in reality as Oracle buying up everything.
Not a typewriter
Whoa there, if I were a major contributor, and one of those dropped a few million in my pocket...or heck even enough to just pay off everything I owe, I might decide to stop developing it. As you probably know, if the major contributors of a project abandon it quietly, sometimes just the time lapse with no progress will kill off the project. My point is everything has a price...you just gotta know where to inject the funds.
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.
Oracle is well known in the business (of making money) to have a very good, large and agressive sales force, and that is what have made them large and successful, not the quality of their products.
We'll start the bidding at -$5.00
(Yes, you pay us to take you over)
I bid -$10.00.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Please explain how you buy open source. The source code is out there in the wild. New developers appear every day.
If you want to play the monopolist that will invite new people to step in and enter the market.
That is the beauty of open source. It is the ultimate opposition to monopolist behavior as it makes the barrier to entry effectively zero.
Of course there are the usual costs or starting a business but with open source there are no real barriers to market entry.
do i hear a -$15.00?
So now we're in a price-is-right bidding war, trying to find the largest sum that Gordonjcp can afford to pay to have his company taken over, without going over (after all, if he can't pay up, it'd really be wrong of him not to reject your bid). -$50,000.00!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I bid negative infinity squared!
Wait... erm... nevermind.
Remember to maintain your supply of
$10B for open source software? They do know they can download it for free... right?
bluHatter
I assume you have done due diligence, and made sure the company debts don't swamp the negative sums you're bidding...
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I still can't comprehend how, what economic forces could have allowed Sun to be in position to be bought over by Oracle, and not the other way around. Consider: Sun had EVERYTHING that Oracle had and more: 1. Its own database systems 2. Its own java application servers 3. Its own web servers /w LDAP servers
4. And on top of that pile up Java, Sparc / Solaris, various Java-based tech, etc.
5. Don't forget the Sun VM.
Now look, Oracle is killing many of the old Sun projects. Looking Glass has gone to dust (maybe even before the purchase), mysql is suffering and most likely will die. I found out that they will no longer manufacture sparc desktops, leaving us the sweet memories of blade150 running Solaris9.
Oh and OpenSolaris -- already in danger of loosing its community.
What would happened? Oracle turns out to be more evil then Microsoft ever was.
You must be a salesperson. I'm not a technology zealot, but Oracle is by far the most superior product in the market for mid ot large size datasets serving mid to large size queries (carefully chosen words
Now MS has the exact same yammering salespeople who drive me nuts when they tout the strength of their package, but I've explored it with the intimate detail that only a DBA can.
Read my lips: Its crap.
When you start to pull away from the sales pitch, super easy install, and drop and go fascade, you quickly unveil a half working SQL engine, a busted backup model, and an internal engine that turns itself into muck heaven forbid if anybody hit it with any sort of large query.
Sorry, its the Oracle DBMS engine that has made them the big bucks. Don't even get me started on Oracle forms and reports.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
If they treat any of them like they've treated OpenSolaris, then I'd say they would die a slow death.
At this point, the last release was June 2009. Development has stopped being exposed to the outside world, we were expecting a May release, and we're going on August now. There still has not been official announcement by Oracle on this topic either.
While OpenSolaris is not a true open source product, it has been mistreated since the Oracle take over. It is unclear why there has been nothing said on it, but I'd rather take a project death at this point than this continued silence. Several key people have left to move onto other projects as well, though others are saying that development is still continuing. And worst of all, it would be a pain in the ass to fork because of their particular license design choice.
The forums have been rather full of people complaining about it as well. Especially after the OpenSolaris board has threatened to kill itself off if Oracle doesn't make some key decisions.
Just bad news all around. And it would be so easy to fix too, just by giving us an official statement on it's future.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
And Oracle in version 7 had a character based installer that didn't require X. And there's still no good reason for Oracle to require X for installation and installation alone.
i'm very tired of hearing "i'll just fork", or "you can't buy an open source project" whenever this comes up.
most OSS projects are heavily funded by commercial outlets, and most often its a single outlet. you can buy an OSS project by buying the developers, or in other words buying the mindshare. whether they quit after the acquisition with bonuses tied to no-compete clauses, or whether they stay on and get put onto other projects, they are gone for the most part.
sure, it's theoretically possible that a troupe of new developers will swoop in and carry on, but that just doesn't happen, in most cases. developers are not 100% portable. that means that it takes a gifted developer to come in and take over a code base designed by someone else. in most cases, you get spot fixes that don't see the overall vision, resulting in increasing bugs and a code base that eventually must be re-written.
and, you rarely get gifted developers with such an interest. working with someone else's vision is not fun. building your own vision is. why would a gifted developer use their nights and weekends to carry on someone else's vision?
Exactly. For some people, OSS is like a crusade, but for many others (most of the people doing the heavy lifting, especially at companies that would be bought) I'm betting it's a paycheck.
For a "mere" $10 billion dollars you could just pay key people a few million each to stop working on products in whatever field and you'd have exactly the same kind of smothering effect on things as you would if you spent $70 billion to buy out the companies.
For anyone who isn't ideologically driven to the extreme or independently wealthy, I'm going to say being offered $1-10 million to work on something else or even just stop working would be _quite_ effective.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Seriously, what I'd like Ellison to do, is really support openoffice. Improvements, cleanups, Java exorcism, and fonts...
Larry, everybody thinks Bill has more money than you! Bill is a household name, and nobody (outside of the techies) knows who you are. You can compensate with big yachts and planes and adventures, but you'll never be as big as Billy until you destroy the MS lockin... Office!
I think the author of the post forgot about the FTC investigation into Oracle purchasing Sun Microsystems, because of the Open Source interests that would be acquired specifically MySQL.
This says one thing, the FTC recognizes FSF/FOSS as a market force.
Should Oracle, or any other company for that matter attempt to buy up any commercial support for FOSS, I believe the FTC and Governments around the globe would have them in court before the transaction could take place. Their 70 billion will be drained from their coffers into the bonus checks of all those law firms.
Oracle is an IT company, who has had the luxury if evading almost every 'war' this industry has seen. It's what makes them so scary in a way, but it also allows them to maneuver under the guise that there's no historical reasons to over react. They realize, I'm sure, that all their monies come from *us*. Who else is going to recommend Oracle? Expensive, Oracle? They aren't in the position of Microsoft, who can disregard the industries brightest minds because stupid people keep buying computers with Windows installed. Oracle made their zillions, in part, from actually appealing to the people who know a good database when they see it.
Oracle and the world witnessed this community eat our own, SCO. So I hope they recognize we really do believe in what we preach and will refrain from anything stupid. I think we are a tad apathetic towards Oracle's new toys, but we are watching and a little cautious and so are other people. Had Microsoft tried to buy Sun, we would have drawn guns cocked and loaded, Oracle... we checked to see if we had ammo and sat down to see what happens.
As a Microsoft DBA, I repeat everything you just said, only with the two products switched. You see, fanboyism is fucking gay, no matter what product we're talking about. Stop it.
While they're at it why don't they buy SCO as well and end that crap too?