Take the Money and Run? I think not.
There's a scorching article on Forbes about the Sun acquisition of MySQL, entitled Cash Me Out: The End of Open Source as Counter-Culture:
These deals have nothing to do with peace, love and software, and everything to do with money. The open source guys realize they can't build a decent business unless they hook up with the old closed source guys.Meanwhile, the old guard have figured out that open source code can be a wonderful way to inflict pain. IBM pumps money into Linux and other open source programs because those programs undermine Microsoft. Microsoft has pumped money into Novell, the number two Linux player, to undermine Red Hat (nasdaq: RHT - news - people ), the number one Linux player. Oracle offers to support customers of Red Hat Linux because it hurts both Red Hat and Microsoft.
While there's some truth to the article's assertion that one open source business strategy is to use commoditization to hurt your competition, overall, the article misses the point of what I once called "the open source paradigm shift," the process that led us to Web 2.0. Just as the outcome of the PC revolution was a shift in power from hardware to software, from IBM to Microsoft, the outcome of the open source revolution is a shift in power from software to new data-driven web 2.0 services, from Microsoft to Google, so to speak. Huge new companies like Google have been built on top of the open source stack. This is business value creation on a stage not seen in decades, and open source has been a key driver.
But each new revolution in computing also drives opportunity for the older layers of the stack. Commodity hardware was a huge opportunity exploited by HP and Dell; commodity software will be a huge opportunity exploited by companies like MySQL, and now, presumably, Sun, if they execute on the opportunity. It's very short-sighted to see major open source acquisitions as a kind of "take the money and run" play by open source companies. It's a bet on just how profoundly the future is going to change.
Cynically viewing open source adoption by the enteprise as Forbes does misses just how profoundly open source is changing the computing and business landscape.
Obviously, I'm biased. I'm on the board of directors of MySQL (through the acquisition), as well as the operator of the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and the MySQL User Conference (which happens in Santa Clara April 14-17 in Santa Clara, and is the right place for Forbes to come to if they really want to see just how vital and interesting the MySQL community is.)
There was also a great comment on the Forbes article by a user who identified him or herself as probablynot, who wrote:
The fringe open source counter-culture you're talking about is alive and well. It's just moved on to more interesting territory, back beneath big business' radar.By the time Forbes starts covering this stuff, most of the real innovators -- the people who do this for its own sake -- have already gotten out. For us, it's old news, and there's a lot more fun to be had elsewhere.
For open source, intrinsic reward is what it's all about. Maybe that's why the business community is having such a hard time getting a grasp on it? All the fun nowadays is in open source hardware (thanks to the flood of cheap component hardware out of Asia) and in so called mash-ups (allowing open-source hackers to harness the power of free software-as-service applications offered by Google and Yahoo and the like).
Expect some incredible innovation surfacing over the next few years in networked information services, and home-brewed robotics and gadgetry.
Amen to that!
tags: mysql conference, open source, oscon, web 2.0
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I remain unconvinced about the general corruption of open source.
The world of radical hackers at the fringe who aren't interested in making money still exist. The EU's study of open source participation (Rishab's survey) showed the top motivation for participation in open source software production was to improve skills. Almost all the software in a Linux distribution was written by people who didn't write it to get rich.
I'm sick to death of the Business Model mob (handy mnemonic: Bowel Movement). This is the group who adamantly insist that it's possible to make money off free software. Technically speaking, it's not.
It's possible to make money from service or traditional software licenses, but not from free software. If you make your money from services then you have a service business, not an open source business. If you make your money from traditional software licenses, you're a traditional software business, not an open source business. If you make your money from data, then you have a data business and not an open source business. "Open source business" is either so vague as to be meaningless (any business that does something with open source) or so precise as to define itself out of existence.
The best thing about these B.M.s is that their source lives on after they die. If it's any good, or any part of it is any good, it can live on after its host's death.
The best open source I see being created, the most innovative stuff, is the code released by researchers as open source. Not just academic researchers, but people like Sam Ruby, Mark Pilgrim, Tim Bray, Why the Lucky Stiff. These people move what we can do forward and they do it in open source. They don't do it to get rich, they do it knowing they won't get rich from their open source code, but they do it because they think progress happens faster when it's made in the open.
I think the most telling part of the article is at the start. In his article saying "open source should now be thought of as part of the mainstream", he quotes an article saying gay culture should now be thought of as part of the mainstream. An article by Andrew Sullivan, famed conservative pundit. Daniel Lyons, the author, is Fake Steve Jobs who delights in the term "freetard" as much as Lyons does in his personal blog. I love the term "freetard", but I also question how dispassionately he's come to his conclusions about the end of the "noisy, shaggy, countercultural, money-hating hacker rebellion".
IMHO to speak about Open Source is like to speak about democracy. open source is a pact between gentlemen as the democracy is. all the players have to respect the rules.
By saying that the Open Source is dead only because a big open source project has been acquired by a commercial player, it's like to say that democracy is dead because a politician was found to be corrupted.
By the users point of view the Open Source means freedom. Freedom to use a product that is not strictly connected to any business.
But open source means first and foremost free knowledge. This is impossible to stop, the knowledge spreading I mean. OK, MySQL was acquired by Sun, but Sun acquired a tool, not the knowledge. I don't know if the attention of the Open Source community is oriented nowadays toward different fields, but for sure if someone believe in a project, he could find the knowledge for free and, here the open source revolution achieved its goal, he could produce it knowing that the people will judge it as a viable alternative to the commercial ones.
The last but not the least, I think that until the day the main goal of the open source will be the knowledge, it will be impossible to stop it. When it focuses on tools to solve common problem it has to consider the chance it's going to play with the commercial players and the rules are different.
The Forbes piece was written by Dan Lyons, the one who loved to besmirch the open source community during the height of the SCO controversy. I can't quite envision a big enough "grain of salt" one should take when reading something by Mr. Lyons....
Well, for one thing, MySQL is not going to go away. It will still be GPL, its development is continuing, the community is still there, the support is still there and the company behind it just got a lot more backing.
If it was just about money, there would be no GPL version of MySQL (or any other open source product, for that matter). And I can see no running at MySQL.
In fact, people feel very strongly about open source at MySQL so don't expect drastic changes in the way it will function. As you pointed out, the innovation that's possible with open source is tremendous, the opportunity to learn from others, build upon existing software rather than to reinvent the wheel all the time is a huge cost saver and there's a huge market of people who are already familiar with the technology. Talk about freedom...
Ah well, probably preaching to the choir ;)
Hi!
Thank you for pointing out the Forbes article, I have a left comment on why I believe they missed the boat in their thinking.
The motivation behind open source is really not well understood, and this creates a large communication gap. The Forbes article is an excellent example of this gap.
To ask David about why he created MySQL you would hear "We thought we could make a living on it". It is not that anyone dislike the money, it is not the main driving force I have thought for a while now that Adam's Bosworth's 6 F's, http://krow.livejournal.com/413808.html, is a good model to start with when trying to understand motivation.
The purchase of MySQL will create change MySQL, but the basic principal for most of us will not really change. We do this because we have fun doing it, and we create change in the world around us. If we were not having fun, we would just do it elsewhere. Sun is showing a great deal of understanding internally so I don't believe this will turn out to be another Cobalt.
Cheers,
-Brian
So these folks actually think that a company says "let's be open source from the beginning, especially with a license like GPL2 where anyone can take the code and redistribute it and use it in their own programs to make money, including simply packaging our software and resell it" because they're looking to be bought out?
That's like saying "I'm going to sleep during the night because I hate daylight." It's completely non-intuitive and doesn't make any logical sense. If they wanted money they'd close the source, give away demo-ware so folks get hooked and sell the product.
While there's some truth to the article's assertion that one open source business strategy is to use commoditization to hurt your competition,
Not that this a deep observation or anything, but isn't that technically a tactic, not a strategy?
In my opinion the probablynot comment gets pretty close to the truth of the matter, but not all the way. There was indeed a lot of 'fun' to be had working on free replacements for various sources of proprietary advantage in the closed-source world, but many of the most obvious of those opportunities have dried up.
Much of what remains is seriously boring stuff and/or isn't needed by any individual hacker or even reasonably sized groups of them, but only by, say, Fortune 1000 companies (think SAP's or Oracle's applications). Presumably someone will eventually take a run at this in much the same way Alfresco took a shot at Content Management, but it's hard to get excited about this except as a business opportunity.
Meanwhile, as you know, there are new sources of proprietary advantage in the Web 2.0 world that are getting attention at different scales and at all levels of the stack, like Yahoo's Hadoop is an open-source implementation of Google's MapReduce, Pligg is an open-source implementation of Digg, Enomalism is an Amazon EC2 clone, and so on.
The velocity of software-based startups is now observably growing year by year, and to an increasing degree all technology startups are becoming software startups (for example, in biotech).
The basic trend to is to commoditize proprietary advantages (almost *any* proprietary advantage) that might hinder a software developer from building something they want through open-source software, and it is speeding up.
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Kinder [02.20.08 09:34 PM]
Sun acquisition of MySQL was a scary news for me first time and i dunno how to deal with it. is mysql gonna be commercial? anyway i can only follow up your "Amen to that". its exactly what i think about your post. good hint.