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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.
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?
The vocabulary of open source development models
James Dixon has given the thumbs-up to my stretching his Bee Keeper analogy to explain open source development models (which is nice) and in doing so has suggested a new term to help quickly explain the difference between vendor- and community- dominated development projects.
The debate about the difference between the two approaches, and the language used to describe them, has been simmering for some time. For some background on it, and an explanation about why it matters, see Ted Ts’o’s post from April.
While the debate may seem like a matter of semantics I agree with Ted that it is important in terms of framing a user’s expectation and understanding of an open source project/product and its potential relationship with the vendor.
This is not to say that one approach is better than the other, but that for some adopters (both corporates and individuals) it is important to know that MySQL is the majority contributer to the development of its database and has the rights that go along with that, while other adopters may be more comforted in knowing that PostgreSQL has a broad and vibrant community.
My perspective is that it is important for (some) customers to be able to understand the distinction, and for that an agreed vocabulary is essential. For an example of why vocabulary is important, consider the role of Cathedral and the Bazaar in providing the industry a vocabulary with which to explain open versus closed development models.
It has occurred to me recently that open source is missing an agreed vocabulary for discussing both development and business models (I’ll leave the business models for another time). The problem, of course, is coming to an agreement.
In his initial post on the subject Ted used the terminology “organic” and “non-organic”, which does work, although as he discovered, some found the term non-organic a little pejorative.
An alternative, suggested by Alex Leverington and originally used in a Harvard business school paper (PDF) is “organic” versus “synthetic”.
While that terminology is probably more accurate it too has some potentially negative connotations. I personally have used the phrases “captive” and “community”, of which the former has obvious negative connotations as far as vendor-led projects are concerned.
In his post referenced above based on my stretching of the Bee Keeper analogy, James Dixon suggests “wild” versus “domestic” could potentially be considered derogatory as far as the community-led approach is concerned. Meanwhile, Ted’s request for suggestions generated a number of possibilities.
Here’s a list of the potential candidates I’ve identified. Take your pick, or feel free to suggest any others:
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).
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.
Trying to keep the customer satisfied
I was just reading Fabrizio Capobanco’s take on the MySQL excitement (”this move is clearly into the right direction”) when it occurred to me that the situation is related to the comments recently made by the former CTO of Kaplan Test, Jon Williams, at the recent OSBC conference.
As I wrote at the time: “Another point Jon made was that the subscription model helps keep open source vendors on their toes as every year he gets to decide whether they will received another payment.”
In other words, as Matt Asay put it: “the more happy he is with his commercial open-source software, the less likely he will be to pay for it. Why? Because his developers will acquire the expertise over time to support themselves and because the product will mature to the point that support will be less necessary.?
Is this the challenge that MySQL faces? A lot of attention is placed on its circa 1:1,000 conversion rate from Community users to Enterprise subscribers, but I wouldn’t mind betting MySQL and Sun are more concerned about retaining that one existing paying customer than they are chasing the 999 who will most likely never pay.
That does not mean the company should - or can afford to - turn its back on its Community users, of course, but it does make it hard to balance the two communities. Ultimately I believe that a lot of the really negative reaction has been based on a misunderstanding that the company was going to remove features from the open source version, which is clearly not the case.
The company needs to move quickly to decide and explain how exactly it is going to license the new functionality. Once it has everyone can make up their own minds and get on with (or without) it. Until then, the confusion is likely to grow.
MySQL?s storage engine program picks up steam
The solidDB for MySQL database engine for MySQL may have lost its sponsor following IBM’s acquisition of Solid Info Tech but events at this week’s MySQL Conference and Expo prove the certified engines program is alive and well.
Not only has Oracle announced that its Innobase subsidiary has updated InnoDB transactional storage engine, but there is also a new member of the certified enginesprogram.
Kickfire has recently emerged from stealth mode with its data warehousing appliance based on MySQL, column-store software, data compression, and a proprietary SQL processor.
Additionally, another potential new storage engine partner emerged in the form of ScaleDB, which is promising to deliver its new scalable storage engine for MySQL in the fourth quarter of this year.
Then of course there will be MySQL’s own Falcon engine, which entered beta testing in March and will be available with MySQL 6.0.
Code modification: the open source database straw man
It is interesting to read RedmondDeveloper News’s take on Oracle’s attitude to open source this morning, especially this paragraph quoting Monica Kumar, Oracle’s senior director for Linux and open source product marketing:
“”We haven’t seen our customers asking for open source databases,” she told me. “Not many customers are interested in looking into the code and mucking around with it, and making changes to it. All they care about is ‘give me the best support, give me the lowest price of entry’.” For that Kumar pointed to Oracle Express.”
It is difficult to disagree with the second part of Monica’s statement. Cost savings are routinely cited as the biggest driver for open source database adoption, while the lack of robust support is the biggest barrier to open source adoption.
Certainly these were the findings of our survey of executives responsible for database purchasing, details of which were published in our recent CAOS report “Turning the Tables? ? The impact of open source on the enterprise database market” (more details here).
However, the first part of Monica’s statement is a straw man that we also addressed in the report - specifically in Section 5.6 “Who wants access to code anyway?”:
“The open source database vendors themselves admit that few customers actually want to view or modify the code,” we stated. “It is worth noting, however, that the third most important reason for deploying open source databases, according to the survey results, was avoiding vendor lock-in.
“This freedom from lock-in is a benefit of open source that the Express products cannot replicate,” we added. “In fact, they could actually be seen to do the opposite…. Proprietary vendors insist that this is not the case, and that the Express products provide freedom and flexibility equal to that of the open source products. They are advised to invest in articulating the relative benefits and use cases of the Express products.”
I also tackled this issue back in December, noting that for customers that understand the value of open source, access to code is important whether they want to modify it or not, for the following reasons:
* Open source adopters understand that it the open source model creates, at least in theory, a contestable model for support and services, freeing them from lock-in.
* They also understand that open source code increases the potential for innovation. Even if they don?t want to modify the code themselves, they can pay someone to do so to make it better suit their requirements.
* They are also reassured that should the vendor in question go belly-up or be acquired, the code will live on an continue to be developed by the community.
One of the key findings of our report was that open source database adoption has been widespread but shallow (the “glass half empty” finding). However, we also noted that open source database adoption will continue to grow, and that “the Internet application space… has been more or less ceded to the open source databases”.
It is no wonder Oracle hasn’t seen customers asking for open source databases - it has been busy looking the other way. We also advised that proprietary vendors need (among other things) to be aware of the open source competition, pay close attention to the service and value they provide to existing customers, and avoid arrogance. The last of those could be the most difficult.