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.

Does it matter?

[Monkeedude1212]

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.

Re:Does it matter?

[FooAtWFU]

It matters because when you buy the "leading open-source company", you also buy the programmers, many of whom will go on to work for Oracle. An open-source project without any developers is probably much better for its users than a closed-source project without developers, sure, but it's still a major setback.

Re:Does it matter?

[ducomputergeek]

We started using PostgreSQL back when Sun bought MySQL. And I can't say we've had any real complaints and actually have found PostgreSQL to be easier to maintain with less table corruption, etc..

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.

Re:Does it matter?

[tcopeland]

> We started using PostgreSQL back when Sun bought MySQL

Right on. And PostgreSQL is about to remove one of the last big barriers for using it - streaming replication is coming in 9.0. Huzzah! I was just listening to a "Rails on PostgreSQL" talk from Pivotal Labs and that was cited as one of the few places where MySQL was ahead... not for long...

Re:Does it matter?

[DerekLyons]

It matters because when you buy the "leading open-source company", you also buy the programmers, many of whom will go on to work for Oracle.

Not just their programmers - but also their customer base.
 
Despite the anarchistic "Everyman is own IT department" fantasies of the FOSS movement, most companies and individuals just want something that works. The days when every business, large and small, had to have management, staff, and gurus to roll their own and keep them rolling are viewed with horror as the 'bad old days'. The idea that the software that keeps their business ticking depends on 'some guy in a basement' and his friends are viewed as equally terrifying. (Which is why these FOSS companies exist in the first place.)
 
Slashdot (and by extension the FOSS movement) really needs to realize that in the real world, people and businesses don't jump to forks for political reasons and in fact are cautious about changing things at because the costs (in actual money) and disruptions that accompany such jumps.

More FOSS would fork from the bought up projects

[petes_PoV]

Open source is not a finite resource. You can't buy *all* of it. You can only buy the ones that are successful today. If (to take an example) Oracle made offers of employment that they couldn't refuse to the main programmers on The Gimp, then anyone who didn;t like the "selling out" (possibly because they didn't get made an offer) could just fork the last non-commercial version and continue down their own particular road.

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.

Suddenly

[toxygen01]

... everyone would start developing opensource.

a large portion aren't buy-able

[Trepidity]

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.

What If . . .

[hardburn]

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.

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:Hi. I'm an open-source developer.

[igny]

We'll start the bidding at -$5.00

(Yes, you pay us to take you over)

I bid -$10.00.

Re:Hi. I'm an open-source developer.

[jgagnon]

I bid negative infinity squared!

Wait... erm... nevermind.

Re:As an Oracle DBA

[BigJClark]

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 ;) ). I realize you can polish and sell a turd, but Oracle's scaling, robustness, and attention to detail regarding the optimization of its core engine, is what sells it, and has for the past ~30 years.

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.

forking doesn't solve all the problems

[farble1670]

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?