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Open source: assimilate and thrive
Matt Asay writes today about the prospects for open source vendors going public or, more likely, being acquired, and wonders whether open source vendors should “hold out for an IPO” or “capitulate” and be acquired.
The latter seems far more likely, especially in the current economic climate. We have written before about the open source vendors most likely to go public in the next couple of years.
Looking at the list of contenders again it is easy to imagine that they could all be snapped up before they make it public thanks to the fact that 1) open source vendors are very attractive investments 2) it is difficult for open source vendors to build the momentum to do so.
I spoke recently with Bernard Dallé at Index Ventures, which has previously invested in the likes of MySQL and Trolltech.
Bernard made the point that while the open source distribution/subscription model is a great way of reaching potential new customers and generating predictable revenue, revenue is on average three times lower than a traditional licensing approach. The result is that it takes more time to build the momentum required to go public.
I previously wrote that for open source vendors patience is a virtue, noting that it took MySQL 12 years to grow to the a position where it was preparing to go public - and even it couldn’t avoid the lure of Sun’s lucre. The open source vendors that have followed MySQL’s example barely get the chance to build a meaningful revenue stream.
There is also the issue that the pure play open source vendors like Red Hat do not have the financial clout to compete with the likes of IBM and Sun and Oracle when it comes to potential acquisitions. You can read a little more about our view on that here.
In his take Matt writes that “I’m coming around to the idea that everything will be a blend of open source and proprietary software or services, at least for the foreseeable future.”
I can’t go in to too much detail but I’m doing some research on this right now and the fact is that the future is now. There is very little money being made out of open source software that doesn’t involve proprietary software and services.
Which is not to say that open source won’t survive and thrive, but if you’re waiting to see pure play open source vendors replace the current crop of industry giants you’re going to be waiting a long time.
On open source and piracy
Dana Blankenhorn asks whether open source is hurt by piracy, prompted by comments made by Louis Suarez-Potts, Sun’s community manager for OpenOffice.org at OSCON.
Dana is unconvinced that open source supporters should necessarily be doing anything about piracy, noting that “There is no direct financial loss to Open Office when someone has a pirated copy of Microsoft Office. To the extent that BSA enforcement actions cause fear in the market, that just benefits open source, so why join it?”
He also notes that “On the other hand if we helped Oracle enforce its license terms we might accelerate the move to MySQL and Ingres.”
However, one need only remember these comments from last year made by the president of Microsoft’s business division, Jeff Raikes, to understand why piracy is bad for open source:
“Our number one goal is that we want people to use our product. If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else. And that’s because we understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the install base of people who are using our products.
What you hope to do is over time you hope to convert them to licensing the software, legally licensing it, so on, and so forth,” he added, neatly - and presumably accidentally - describing the method by which commercial open source vendors benefit by making their core code available free of charge.
So it’s always a delicate balance, because what you want to do is you want to push towards getting legal licensing, but you don’t want to push so hard that you lose the asset that’s most fundamental in the business.”
Additionally on our recent virtual tour of Europe we saw how piracy was seen as a barrier to further adoption of open source in countries like Greece and Romania.
Supported by government, open source can be used as a tool defeat piracy. Louis explained, ComputerWorld reports that: “By cracking down on software piracy, nations around the globe are starting to see that they can help themselves dramatically by encouraging innovation and creativity — as well as job growth and richer economies — through open-source development.”
An example of this is Russia, where Microsoft’s bungled attempt to crack down on software piracy resulted in a decision by the government to reduce piracy and encourage local business by encouraging the use of open source software.
What Marc Fleury did next
We knew Marc Fleury couldn’t stay out of the business world for long. The founder of JBoss has leaked details of his new venture, an open source home automation community named OpenRemote.
The OpenRemote team also includes the creator of Asterisk Mark Spencer, JBoss veterans Juha Lindfors, Christian Bauer, Java X10 project creator Wade Wassenberg, and Linux Home Automation founder Neil Cherry.
Together they, and others, plan to create a complete open source home automation including the OpenRemote Controller hardware, OpenRemote Console Applications to make use of the iPhone and iTouch as a universal remote (although any device with browser will work), the OpenRemote Manager, and the Beehive Database.
As Marc notes (”I have invented Professional Open Source, have you heard of it?”) he has also created OpenRemote Inc to support the community via debt funding and is exploring different potential business models to generate revenue.
He doesn’t appear to be in a hurry to do so, however. “This is first and foremost a community effort and what will come of it will come of it. Planning to far ahead would be counterproductive and futile,” he writes. “Figuring out the business model, this is one thing I can help with. But for right now, let’s focus on a community. Without a community, there is no OSS model. The community is what you do with it.”
MySQL?s cloudy new database project
When Sun acquired MySQL and announced that it would invest the resources necessary to position the open source database for mission-critical deployments, I think everyone assumed that the database would eventually become bigger and heavier.
Few would have predicted that we would also see a project that would make the database smaller and lighter, but that is exactly what Drizzle, a new project from Sun’s MySQL director of architecture Brian Aker, is all about.
Drizzle is taking a back-to-the-drawing-board approach to refactoring MySQL by ripping out much of the additional enterprise functionality that has gone into it since version 4.1 and focusing on the demands of a core set of applications.
As Brian explains : “Stored Procedures, Views, Triggers, Query Cache, and Prepared Statements are gone for now. The field types have been simplified and there is an open debate about the SHOW commands (I am falling into the camp that think they may just belong in the client application but not in the server). Will any of this go back in? It is hard to say. The goal right now is to target a certain class of applications/developers and see if this is useful. As an example:
1) Web based apps.
2) Cloud components.
3) Databases without business logic (aka stored procedures).
4) Multi-Core architecture.”
The project also has a more community-centric development philosophy, although it is not clear from the FAQ what the copyright implications are for would-be contributors.
Brian announced the project with the caveat that it is “not looking to be 100% compatible with MySQL” and “certainly not a replacement for MySQL” which is important to consider, but the project clearly has the blessing of MySQL CTO Monty Widenius who has stated that “Drizzle solves many of the problems that MySQL’s development has had for years.”
Among the benefits noted by Monty are:
* “It opens up MySQL development for the community; You no longer have to wait years to get your patches and reasonable extensions into the server.
* Critical bugs that have existed for years can finally get fixed as the development is no longer constrained by unrealistic release schedules that put artificial constraints on things that can be fixed.
* Drizzle will put some MySQL server differentiation on a true test; A bit like Fedora does to Red Hat.
* Drizzle has created new excitement in the MySQL developer community; A lot of people seem to be very enthusiastic to work on it in a true community-oriented manner.
* Developers working on Drizzle is doing drastic refactoring of the server, something that MySQL planned to do years ago but never happened.
* Development decisions is again driven by people that are using the server daily; This will ensure that Drizzle will be faster and more stable than what can be done with current MySQL development model
* Drizzle will target the MySQL core users, the web users, whose requirements have been ignored for years while the core MySQL developers have added features that they don’t need.
* In addition Drizzle will include the latest InnoDB code; You don’t have to wait for MySQL 6.0 or go to the trouble of annually downloadoing and installing the InnoDB plugin from Oracle just to get access to the latest and fastest InnoDB version.”
It is interesting to see Monty mention Drizzle as a potential Fedora-like project, especially given his link to ProvenScaling’s publication of MySQL sources and binaries and a blog post from Peter Zaitsev wondering whether it makes MySQL Community redundant.
It would be wrong to claim that as an official endorsement, but MySQL is clearly not trying to discourage community-led projects while it has also moved its sources to Bazaar and Launchpad to (as Kaj Arno puts it) “expand our external contributor base”.
All in all it is fascinating to see that MySQL, which many would consider one of the more mature open source projects, continues to evolve and experiment, especially now it has more freedom to do so as part of Sun. As Monty says:
“Drizzle is one of the good things that have been made possible by Sun acquiring MySQL. Brian has been working on Drizzle with the blessing and encouragement from Sun’s upper management. We are finding Sun to be open and encouraging of innovation, this has been a good aspect of the acquisition.”
On open source and cloud computing
Last week I wrote about whether Google’s potential acquisitions might be stifled by its focus on its own infrastructure software projects but noted that by releasing App Engine the company was encouraging a wider ecosystem of applications based on its platform.
What I didn’t discuss at the time was the potential risk of application vendors finding themselves locked-in to the App Engine platform. Of course Amazon also has this issue, the potential impact of which was revealed this weekend.
It is with this in mind that it was interesting to see the debut of 10gen, a new open source cloud computing start-up founded by Doubleclick veterans and backed by Union Square Ventures.
Over at The 451 Group’s Cloud Cover blog, Vishy Venugopalan has the details:
“10gen offers an open source stack consisting of an app server and object database; developers can write apps in server-side Javascript or Ruby (experimental) and host it on their own computing clouds,” he writes.
“It?s also striking that many platform-as-a-service companies deviate from the standard Web server-app server-relational DB trio, of which the LAMP stack is an example. Google App Engine uses BigTable for its storage whereas 10gen wrote its own MongoDB database.”
10gen also has it own application server and file system, and the whole lot is available under open source licenses.
Of course 10gen isn’t the only open source cloud enabler/provider. There’s also Enomalism and Joyent among others that boast their ability to reduce vendor lock-in. Then there’s the likes of Eucalyptus, Puppet, Hypertable, Hbase, and Hadoop.
While Amazon and Google have first mover advantage when it comes to the cloud, could concerns over lock-in and portability mean that open standards and open source are the long-term platform for cloud computing?
451 CAOS Links - 2008.07.01
Progress acquires IONA. Red Hat announces quarterly earnings. Optaros raises new round of funding. (and more)
Progress Software Corporation to Acquire IONA Technologies, Progess Software / IONA Technologies (Press Release)
Red Hat Reports First Quarter Results, Red Hat (Press Release)
Optaros Closes $12 Million in Series C Financing Co-Led by .406 Ventures & Globespan Capital Partners, Optaros (Press Release)
Sourcefire, Inc. Responds to Barracuda Networks Letter, Sourcefire (Press Release)
Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum Joins Forces with LiMo, LiPS Forum / LiMo Foundation (Press Release)
Microsoft Takes Additional Steps in Implementing Interoperability Principles, Microsoft (Press Release)
Sun Microsystems Releases New GlassFish and MySQL Offering To Provide Customers With Unlimited Deployments of Enterprise Class Application Server and Database Software, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)
Oracle Updates Entire Family of Oracle Berkeley DB Embeddable Databases, Oracle (Press Release)
Openmoko Signs Five Distributors for Freerunner Open Source Mobile Phone, Openmoko (Press Release)
MuleSource Releases Mule Galaxy Enterprise, MuleSource (Press Release)
NETGEAR Launches Open Source Wireless-G Router Enabling Linux Developers and Enthusiasts to Create Firmware for Specialized Applications, NETGEAR (Press Release)
Zenoss Expands IT Management Solution for Managed Service Providers, Zenoss (Press Release)
Actuate First to Provide Support for Eclipse BIRT 2.3, Actuate (Press Release)
Latest Open-Xchange Public Beta Gives Customers a Free Preview to Business-Class Groupware, Open-Xchange (Press Release)
Open Source Community Wins at Ingres Code Sprint, Ingres (Press Release)
Coming Battle Over Open Source Phones, Forbes.com, Elizabeth Woyke (Article)
Linux experiences ‘prolific’ growth, says Linux Foundation’s Zemlin, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, Pam Derringer (Article)
Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver, OSnews, Thom Holwerda (Article)
Red Hat CEO: Oracle/BEA Deal Is Helping Us, Internet News, Sean Michael Kerner (Article)
The State of Open Mobile OSes, TechCrunch, John Biggs (Blog)
When is an open-source project ready?, Practical Technology, Stephen j. Vaughan-Nichols (Blog)
Nokia?s Open Source Response: The Symbian Q&A, RedMonk - tecosystems, Stephen O’Grady (Blog)
[from bushwald] Open-source venture funding rises 14 percent in Q2 | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET News.com
Red Hat?s other open source management project
Matt Asay is excited about Red Hat’s Spacewalk project to release the code behind its Red Hat Network Satellite product under an open source license (as he should be, he’s been waiting over a year for it). As well as anticipation, Matt’s excitement can also be attributed to the potential for Spacewalk to become the default management platform for open source software.
As he writes:
“What is the first thing that MySQL and JBoss did to add value to their support subscriptions? Build networks. What, presumably, will be the first things that other open-source companies do? Build networks.
What is the result? A swamp of incompatible service-delivery networks.
Now consider the power for Red Hat if its Spacewalk actually served as a gathering point - an integration point - for the commercial open-source community? Powerful.”
It is a powerful opportunity, but is Spacewalk (a Linux management platform) the right tool for the job? As Bob Bickel notes in the comments to Matt’s post, Red Hat’s RHQ project with Hyperic is a broader project that is possibly more suited to operational management. Indeed he reveals that Ringside Networks is using it for an upcoming release of Ringside Networks Social Application Server.
Of course now both RHQ and Spacewalk are open source projects there may the opportunity for cross-pollination and, as is stated on the RHQ website: “The new project will provide a common set of management services, which will be incorporated into future editions of Red Hat products such as JBoss Operations Network and Red Hat Network, as well as Hyperic HQ.”
It will be interesting to see if and how the two projects align. Watch this space(walk).
451 CAOS Links - 2008.06.20
Neocleus obtains new round of funding. Novell releases OpenSUSE 11. Red Hat acquires open source identity code from Identyx. (and more)
Neocleus Raises Over $11M in Series B Financing, Neocleus (Press Release)
openSUSE Project Announces Availability of openSUSE 11.0, Novell (Press Release)
Red Hat Delivers on Linux Automation with Identity Management and Open Source Systems Management Solutions, Red Hat (Press Release)
Sun Microsystems Releases New Version of Open Source Database Platform for Carrier Grade Telecommunications Environments, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)
Jaspersoft v3 Marks Major Milestone for Commercial Open Source Business Intelligence, Jaspersoft (Press Release)
Black Duck Software Marks the One-Year Anniversary of GPLv3 with an Examination of Trends in Use, Black Duck Software (Press Release)
Subversion 1.5 now available through CollabNet-Sponsored Subversion Open Source Community, CollabNet (Press Release)
Zenoss Scales Open Source Network & Systems Monitoring Solution to Address Needs of Large Enterprise IT Environments, Zenoss (Press Release)
Ingres Joins Red Hat Exchange, Red Hat (Press Release)
SourceLabs Extends Self-Support Technology To Xen Virtualization Software, SourceLabs (Press Release)
IONA Reduces Compliance Complexity For Financial Messaging Data Services, IONA Technologies (Press Release)
Registration Now Open: The Linux Plumbers Conference, Linux Foundation (Press Release)
Red Hat chief: We are hard to do business with, ZDNet UK, Andrew Donoghue (Article)
Over 8 million ? way to go!, The Mozilla Blog, Mary Colvig (Blog)
Nokia: Open source developers should play by our rules, InfoWorld - Fatal Exception, Neil McAllister (Blog)
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Open source tour of Europe: France
To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.
One of the potential favourites for EURO 2008 was always going to be eliminated from the group stages given France, Italy and The Netherlands were all drawn in Group C and it was France that made an early exit following a 2-0 defeat to the Italians last night.
France must also be considered one of the favourites to be crowned EURO 2008 Open Source champion given the number of open source-related policies, projects and vendors. It would almost be easier to list the departments of the French government that have not adopted open source.
Key policies:
As long ago as 2001 the French Agency for Information and Communication Technologies in the Administration announced that it was promoting the use of open standards and open-source software in e-government applications. The following year it published a guide designed to help public sector entities choosing and using free and open source software.
In 2002 the Commissariat Général du Plan, a report analyzing the French software industry was published and recommended that public agencies promote the development of free software platforms and open standards.
More recently, in April 2007 the Ministry of Defense announced that it would prefer open source software for both acquired and internally-developed software projects.
Meanwhile the Practical Guide to the use of Open Source software by public authorities was published in late 2007, while in May this year the Ministry of Education agreed a four-year 60% discount with Mandriva for the adoption of Linux by all teachers and staff (estimated at 1.5 million employees) at France’s 250 schools and universities.
Somewhat extraordinarily given the amount of deployment projects listed below, it was recommended in January that France should increase its use of open source software and consider tax benefits to stimulate open source development. The recommendations were made by an economic commission set up by France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Key projects:
There are almost too many to mention, and the following is just a taster. The Ministry of Equipment and Transport migrated 1,500 Windows NT Servers to what was then Mandrakelinux in 2004. Meanwhile the Ministry of Defense contracted five suppliers to create a secure Linux variant, the Family Allowance Agency migrated to Red Hat and JOnAS, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs adopted an open source web application deployment and development platform.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries migrated 500 Windows NT servers to Mandriva in 2005, followed by a further 400 servers starting in 2007. The Tax Ministry (PDF) adopted the JBoss Application Server as part of its COPERNIC project to overhaul of the IT system that underpins the French tax system.
In 2006 the Directorate General for the Modernisation of the State approved the adoption of OpenOffice for 400,000 central administration desktops as part of a move to support the Open Document Format.
The Ministry of Education migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to Red Hat Enterprise Linux last year, while the Culture and Communication Ministry migrated from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.
This year the gendarmerie announced plans to migrate up to 70,00 workstations to Ubuntu running Firefox and OpenOffice.org, while Ubuntu was also chosen for adoption by French MPs as part of the migration of the National Assembly from Windows to Linux.
Open source has also been adopted by local authorities including Arles, Grand Nancy, Lille, Val d?Oise, Marseille, Brest, Grenoble, Lyon, Rennes, and Marseille again.
Adoption of open source is also strong in the private sector. Examples include the adoption of MySQL by retailers Franprix and Leader Price to manage the data in their supply chain and product distribution platforms.
Another comes from Agence France-Presse, which has adopted Nuxeo?s open source content management system, as have SNCF, La Poste, and Gaz de France, among others. Meanwhile Airbus created its own open source development tools for building mission critical systems based on Eclipse, and Peugeot Citroen moved to SUSE Linux for up to up to 20,000 desktops.
Key vendors:
France has a host of open source vendors, of which the most famous is probably Linux vendor Mandriva. Former Mandriva founder Gaël Duval is having another crack at the open source desktop with Ulteo, while other French open source vendors include content management vendor Nuxeo, data integration firm Talend, and services firm Linagora. Also worth a mention is the OW2 Consortium, a non-profit open source middleware consortium formed by the merger of ObjectWeb and Orientware. Although its headquarters is actually in Belgium, its roots and its administration home is in Paris.
And another thing:
France even has its own family free software license. CeCILL was released in July 2004 and is designed to be compatible with both the GNU GPL and French law. It has been approved by the Free Sofware Foundation. CeCILL was followed by CeCILL-B, which is a BSD-style license, and CeCILL-C, which is more comparable wit the LGPL.
As always we welcome your input. If you have examples of open source adoption in France that we’ve overlooked, please leave a comment below. For more stops on the European tour, see this post.
Open source in the enterprise: a CIO.com blogathon
I’m very pleased to say that I’ve been invited to join CIO.com’s first Executives Online discussion panel, Open Source in the Enterprise, this week. As the starter post explains, the event is a virtual round table discussion bringing together a number of open source executives, and me, to discuss the enterprise adoption of open source software between today and Friday June 6.
It promises to be an interesting discussion, and CIO.com has been good enough to give us some starting discussions points with its survey of attitudes towards open source in the CIO community. I’ll be posting more details here as the discussion evolves.
The panel includes:
MySQL licensing redux
After all the fuss it appears that MySQL will be remaining open source after all. As Kaj Arno and Monty Widenius report, Marten Mickos announced at CommunityOne that the MySQL Server will stay open source, as well as the forthcoming encryption and compression backup features, which MySQL had considered making available only to paying customers.
“The change comes from MySQL now being part of Sun Microsystems. Our initial plans were made for a company considering an IPO, but made less sense in the context of Sun, a large company with a whole family of complementary open source software and hardware products,” writes Kaj.
“My hope is that the experiment when it comes to closed source extensions developed by Sun is now ended. As far as I know, there is no existing plans for any closed source extensions to the MySQL server,” adds Monty.
While that seems pretty clear cut, there is still room for a little confusion. Kaj writes: “To financially support MySQL?s free and open source platform, we have a business model which allows both community and commercial add-ons, and we remain committed to it.”
Monty clarifies: “I interpret this, in the context of Mårten’s and Jonathan’s announcements, that we will continue to support and make available commercial addons to the MySQL server from third party, like the Infobright storage engine. Things that we develop ourselves at Sun, at least on the server, will continue to be open source.”
UPDATE - The phrase “at least on the server” is revealing, however. Matt Asay points out that MySQL will continue to develop commercial add-ons above the server, which is the direction as I understand it, and - as I noted two weeks ago - has been the direction for some time. - UPDATE
While we’re on the subject of MySQL (again) it’s also worth taking a look at the slides (PDF) from Monty Widenius’s “Future Design Hurdles to Tackle in the MySQL Server” presentation at the recent MySQL Conference and Expo.
The slides provide a fascinating insight into the technical challenges Sun and MySQL face in positioning MySQL for wider adoption, as well as evidence of the intention to be more open, both about the nature of the challenges and in accepting more contributions from outside the company.
As slide 18 states, the fact that the MySQL community is not currently contributing to development means that the project is not benefiting from the experience of real-world users and that the user base is growing slowly.
The suggested solution is to open up the development process to give outside developers commit and decision rights and to learn from how PostgreSQL is developed. I previously wrote that “if MySQL does choose to develop closed source extensions to the GPL code it will probably have to find some way of balancing that with providing more value to the community.”
It would appear that the development of close source extensions is no longer an issue, but that providing more value to the user community remains a priority. Sun has gained a lot in acquiring MySQL, but one thing it hasn’t gained is an understanding of building a wider developer community. In fact, MySQL has a lot to learn from Sun in that regard - both its successes and its failures.
Finding the right balance - MySQL?s changing development model
I?ve already taken a look at MySQL?s changing business model and the potential business drivers behind the company considering introducing new functionality under to Enterprise customers only. One area that I didn?t dive into was the impact on the company?s development model.
This, in fact, was the focus of Jeremy Cole?s initial take on the news as well as a significant response from Marten Mickos. ?MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise,? explained Jeremy.
?As I?ve discussed before, the size of the user base for MySQL Enterprise is much smaller than for MySQL Community,? he added. ?That means these critical features will be tested by only a few of their customers. So, in effect, they will be giving their paying customers real, true, untested code. How is this supposed to work??
Marten has partially answered that question in an interview with Glyn Moody at Computerworld UK:
?GM: One issue is that you seem to be throwing away an advantage of open source in the sense that if it is closed then obviously people can’t help you make it better.
MM: That’s true ? absolutely, it’s true. That’s why for any such code we will have to hire more QA people, and do more work because we don’t get that help from the community.?
It occurs to me that this could create a vicious circle: the more QA people MySQL needs to hire, the more revenue it will need to generate to cover costs. The more revenue it needs to generate, the more value it needs to provide Enterprise users. The more value it needs to provide enterprise users, the more likely it is to introduce proprietary add-ons. The more proprietary add-ons it has, the more QA people it needs to employ. You get the picture.
This is of course different from the ?virtuous circle? which sees the community users benefiting from MySQL?s commercial activities in that they also fund the development of GPL features. In fact, the fear for some community users is that withholding new features from the community version in fact breaks that virtuous circle.
In response to Jeremy?s post, Marten pointed out that InnoDB, WebYog and indeed MySQL already have features that are only available for paying customers. ?All those products are working well and serving customers well,? he wrote, while comparing MySQL?s position to PostgreSQL-based vendors.
?The same applies to the largest group of PostgreSQL-based companies: EnterpriseDB, Greenplum, Netezza, etc. It seems to me that the situation is analogous between Postgres and MySQL: a great product under an open source license, and various commercial initiatives around it,? he added.
With all due respect to Marten, there is a significant difference between the captive open source development model for MySQL and the community open source development model for PostgreSQL.
The vast majority of MySQL development is done by MySQL employees. To date that development model, combined with the dual licensing and support subscription models, has served both Community and Enterprise users equally. As the company adds more features and services to the Enterprise product it will increasingly have to try to serve two masters, however.
As Marten told Computerworld: ?So as we do this, of course, we meet exactly the crossfire that we are now in, meaning the same solution seems to upset one market and please the other one. So then the question is: How do we ensure that we are not completely upsetting our open source users when we do something commercially, or vice versa.?
The difference between MySQL and the PostgreSQL-based vendors in this regard the PostgreSQL community isn?t dependent on EnterpriseDB et al for code.
The relationship between the PostgreSQL-based vendors and the PostgreSQL community is more symbiotic. EnterpriseDB, Greenplum, and Netezza work with the community, employ core developers and contribute code, but they are also independent of the project.
While they benefit from contributing code and improving the strength of PostgreSQL for all, the BSD license means they have no obligation to contribute their own proprietary developments. The PostgreSQL-based vendors have much more freedom, therefore, to decide based on their own business drivers when code should be open source, and when it should not.
In fact, if any dependency exists in the PostgreSQL model it is EnterpriseDB and Greenplum?s dependency on the PostgreSQL community. MySQL has no such dependency on the community.
MySQL also has no obligation to contribute new features to the open source model, but then it is then it has built a business on supplying the same code to both user groups, and has benefited from doing so.
As Zack Urlocker noted: ?While the number of customers who pay us is much smaller than the number of community users who do not, most of our paying customers first used MySQL because it is available freely under the GPL open source license. And in many cases, we know that MySQL is popular because of the work of the community who are out there using it, blogging about it, creating add-on tools, products or services.?
He added: ?MySQL is in the middle trying to make sure we are balanced in our actions and not neglecting the interests of either market. It’s not always obvious how to benefit both groups and there are few successful models to guide us at this point. So we are constantly forging new territory, experimenting, trying new things, and listening for input.?
Balance is the critical word here, and if MySQL does choose to develop closed source extensions to the GPL code it will probably have to find some way of balancing that with providing more value to the community.