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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."
Then you'd get $10 Billion dollars worth of Forks starting off the last release, and everything would be the same as usual, except that Oracle would have acquired a lot of software.
It would cause a ripple for a while, like it has with MySQL, but trust me, in time - we'll have found another FOSS solution. The same thing would happen elsewhere.
Because of that, it would be very difficult for Oracle to monetize their purchases. Certainly to the degree that made any sort of financial sense and maybe not to the satisfaction of the shareholders.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
... everyone would start developing opensource.
Oracle can only really effectively buy open-source companies of the MySQL variety: where the vast majority of development is done by one, medium-sized, for-profit company closely associated with the project. Stretching a little more, they can buy multi-project companies on the lower end of "large" that do a lot of open-source development, like Sun.
But a lot of open-source is done by groups that deviate to either side of that. Either they're more distributed open-source projects with no central entity to buy in the first place, or they're run by very large companies that Oracle couldn't possibly buy, like Google and IBM.
10 PRINT CHR$(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
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.
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?