If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. That popular aphorism never seemed truer than today when reading The Wall Street Journal's analysis of Wikipedia's declining volunteer base. Despite countless articles extolling the virtues and seeming omnipotence of "community" over the past several years, the technology industry seems to be settling back into old habits:
Command and control.
It's not that the "wisdom of crowds" idea hasn't influenced the way technology is developed, or how news and information are gathered and distributed. It has.
It's just that the promised sea change has proved to be far less disruptive than we expected.
Take Wikipedia. As the Journal calls out, volunteerism has declined as the ease of contribution has waned. The easy topics are taken. Rules for upping the quality have proliferated. Wikipedia is becoming...corporate.
Nick Carr has been pointing this out for years, but it's only now becoming self-evident. Wikipedia has grown up and, in so doing, is looking more and more like the encyclopedic world it sought to displace.
Nor is it alone. Open-source business models increasingly look like proprietary software models, as the Software Freedom Law Center's Bradley Kuhn suggests.
Even uber successful open-source communities like Joomla have discovered that reliance on volunteers falls short of what a few good paid developers can do.
That's a positive discovery by Joomla. A more worrisome discovery is that Mozilla remains far too dependent on Google to fund development of Firefox. Mozilla has lots of community, right? Yes. As Mozilla CEO John Lilly has said, 40 percent of Firefox's code comes from developers not employed by the foundation.
But that still leaves 60 percent, and virtually all of the core development work, that relies on "company," not "community," which is how much of the world's best open-source software is developed: funded by IBM and other "community" members.
For those who think "community" is a euphemism for "everyone else doing my work for me," think again. It just doesn't work that way.
Of course, companies can go to the opposite extreme, too. Apple, for one, gets beat up for a heavy-handed approach to its App Store approval process. Apple, in other words, doesn't seem to care one iota what "the community" thinks.
But then, this is the same App Store with more than 100,000 applications and 2 billion downloads to date. No wonder Apple isn't apologizing: it's clearly benefiting most people most of the time, or the application developers would take their complaints to a different platform.
But they haven't, and this calls out the problem with deifying "community." It's accepted wisdom that one shouldn't "anger the community," as if it's some unknown god that demands the occasional virgin to be thrown into the volcano. But the truth is, "community" is not really much different from the "customers" and "partners" the industry has sought to satisfy for decades.
So, yes, by all means seek to work with your community of users and partners, but don't expect "the community" to do your work for you. Guess what? "The community" already has a day job, and can't afford to work full-time for you unless you pay it.
All of which leaves us largely where we started. The most successful software companies don't rely on some vague "community" to build their products. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Google (Android, anyone?), and even, increasingly, Red Hat (JBoss, KVM, etc.) build great software based on their own, internal plans and expertise and "the community" buys it (or resells/embeds/etc. it).
The big shift, however, has been in the transparency of the feedback loop, which has been a welcome change in the industry. So, to the extent that "community" simply implies a more open way of developing and distributing software, then, yes, it has been significant.
But it hasn't changed the world. It has only changed the way the dominant technology companies...dominate.
The European Commission may be taking its time analyzing the competitive impact of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun/MySQL, but the industry can't afford to dither. On Tuesday, MySQL competitor EnterpriseDB announced that Red Hat joined its $19 million Series C funding round, which follows IBM's own investment in EnterpriseDB.
Is the software industry, once devoted to MySQL, preparing to shift allegiances to Postgres?
Probably not, but clouds are forming. On Monday, I talked with EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian, a former Red Hat executive, and he suggested several reasons for Red Hat's investment of "a significant amount of money" in the open-source database vendor, EnterpriseDB. As he told me:
This is a great step forward for our company and for Postgres. Red Hat has done heroic work bringing commercial open source to mainstream enterprise adoption. And it's making a difference: arguably billions of dollars of spend in operating system and middleware has gone back to customers. You want to talk about returning control to users? That's the real yardstick. That's real disruption.
For EnterpriseDB to have the trust and support of Red Hat as a partner and investor is a huge help to our company and I think it gives another strong indication to enterprise customers challenging their old spending habits, that there is more they can do.
It's important to note that Red Hat has been distributing Postgres for some time. It's in every copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora that Red Hat ships. As such, it's already in the hands of thousands of Red Hat customers and users, and is in heavy demand in some geographies, particularly Latin America. But until now Red Hat has not provided robust support for the database on par with its support for Linux and JBoss.
That's about to change.
The change is good for Red Hat customers, but this isn't the only area in which Red Hat has been seeking to expand its influence. Red Hat has been actively looking for opportunities to invest in a variety of open-source companies, most recently investing in JasperSoft.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, however, nicely marries pragmatism with idealism, as suggested by his comments on EnterpriseDB's subscription model:"EnterpriseDB is also working to create customer value through a subscription support model. Clearly, this is a model we see as beneficial."
He's right, but it's interesting to hear him laud a model (i.e., a subscription to proprietary and open-source software, plus maintenance and support) from which he distanced Red Hat in Red Hat's Q1 earnings call. ("I certainly hope for and we certainly like to work with other open source companies out there. But those are fundamentally different business then what we're doing.")
He's right the second time (in the EnterpriseDB news release). They are not fundamentally different business models. I suspect his comments on the earnings call reflected an attempt to get out of an inaccurate and misleading question from the ever-entertaining Trip Chowdhry.
Regardless, Red Hat's investment in Postgres vendor EnterpriseDB suggests that it, along with IBM and others, is prepared to bolster alternatives to MySQL in its larger quest to provide real competition in the database industry.
To be fair, Red Hat's interest in Postgres and EnterpriseDB precedes the EU's intervention in Oracle's proposed acquisition of MySQL. The interest is understandable: Postgres is a great choice for a wide variety of database workloads. It's built for transactions and higher-end use cases, like the Oracle and IBM database workloads that it can replace (or augment).
EnterpriseDB plays into Red Hat's overarching strategy of commoditizing key infrastructure, as Whitehurst has noted. Given that the $20 billion database market is concentrated in just three vendors who control 85 percent of the market, databases are ripe for disruption, disruption that Red Hat can feed from a distance.
Red Hat's investment in EnterpriseDB says more about Red Hat's increasing awareness of its larger role in the open-source ecosystem than it does of any competition with MySQL. It's about time.
For years, Red Hat sat unopposed at the top of the CIO Insight Vendor Value study. In 2008, however, Google pushed Red Hat aside with its low-cost, easy-to-use enterprise applications. This year, Red Hat has come roaring back to share the top ranking with Google.
Could this be a sign of CIOs' restive relationships with traditional vendors and an increasingly insatiable appetite for the cost and ease-of-use advantages of open source and software as a service/cloud computing?
The answer is almost certainly "Yes." It is telling that old-school vendors like IBM (ranked 20th overall), Microsoft (25th), Novell (29th), and Oracle (35th) are so far down the CIOs' list.
It is equally telling, however, that it is with these apparently less-preferred vendors that CIOs spend the vast majority of their IT budgets. Or perhaps that's the point? In other words, CIOs spend with such vendors today because they have to, but given their druthers, they're going to invest more money in Red Hat and Google going forward.
Red Hat and Google are still rounding errors in the overall IT spending picture, but CIOs seem to be signaling an appetite for more. It's not about reducing lock-in and other colorful marketing phrases, either: it's about great, easy-to-use software at a compelling price.
You know, the very thing that Microsoft used to win CIO plaudits for delivering.
From the report:
CIOs are more likely to try software as a service (than traditional, packaged software), which is better understood and simpler to use and requires no upfront investment in hardware or software.
This is the heart of the CIO uprising. And it's why low-cost, high-value companies like Intel (ranked first overall), Cisco/WebEx (ranked sixth and 11th, respectively), and Sun (sixth) are climbing the charts.
For now, however, Google and Red Hat rule the roost in the Software category of CIO Insight's annual study:
Both Red Hat and Google essentially offer the same thing: great software on a subscription basis. While this model often offers lower prices than competitors, it's important to note that "free" is not the value proposition here. (If it were, for example, Red Hat customers would be leaving in droves for Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, CentOS. They aren't.)
No, the value proposition is customer control via the subscription model that enables less costly ways to buy into the software, and to turn off maintenance costs, if desired.
It's a winning formula, one that more vendors should consider adopting. Today IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle command the majority of IT dollars, but this survey suggests a rebellion is underway. Inertia can only support the traditional vendors for so long.
It takes time, leadership, and a fair amount of luck to successfully build an open-source community. It also takes money. Lots of it, if IBM's $1 billion commitment to Linux is any indication.
Unfortunately, the return on such open-source community investments may be permanently scuppered by the European Commission's misguided defense of MySQL from Oracle's intended acquisition. If the EC is going to punish successful open-source endeavors like MySQL, will investors still clamor to finance the rise of open source?
In many ways, MySQL is the quintessential commercial open-source success story. On the financial side, MySQL managed to build a vibrant business, doing north of $90 million at the time of its acquisition by Sun Microsystems in February 2008.
Equally compelling, however, is the exceptional user and developer community that formed around the open-source database project, registering tens of millions of downloads and a massive developer community.
This community augmented MySQL's financial fortunes, of course, but it also protected MySQL database users from the whims of the company, as former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos wrote to European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes:
Even if Oracle for whatever reason would have malicious or ignorant intent regarding MySQL (not that I think so), the positive and massive influence MySQL has on the DBMS market cannot be controlled by a single entity - not even by the owner of the MySQL assets. The users of MySQL exert a more powerful influence in the market than the owner does.
Unfortunately, the EC seems intent on punishing MySQL--both community and company--for its success. Already the MySQL database project has started to fracture into competing forks, while business rivals like EnterpriseDB and IBM collect confused customers.
More worryingly, the EC's actions may end up diminishing potential returns to investors in other open-source projects, particularly those that take the added time and cost to build global communities.
Technology mergers and acquisitions activity is at a 20-month high. Open-source companies, however, may miss out on this resurgence, particularly those, like Acquia and EnterpriseDB, that build on successful open-source communities (Drupal and Postgres, respectively).
Indeed, based on the EC's actions, perhaps the worst thing these companies could do is foster successful open-source communities. Maybe they should just take the cash and run?
Consider: the EC didn't challenge Yahoo's acquisition of Zimbra, VMware's acquisition of SpringSource, Citrix's acquisition of XenSource, etc. What do they have in common? Rising revenue but, except in the case of SpringSource, much more limited communities than MySQL. (Even the Spring community pales in comparison to MySQL, impressive though it is.)
Granted, the major difference with Oracle/MySQL is that the two are ostensibly competitors, as CNET points out. In the letter referenced above, however, Mickos dismisses such competition. The reality is that MySQL and Oracle compete in two different database markets.
Regardless, as well as MySQL was doing, $90-plus million is spare change in the global database market. The EC, in other words, isn't trying to protect MySQL's business. It's trying to protect MySQL's community.
Such mollycoddling of an open-source community is destructive to all future investments in similar endeavors. Why should commercial entities bother fostering community--the very community that makes them less susceptible to hostile takeover and anticompetitive forces--if doing so simply ends up ruining financial returns?
The EC means well, but it is not doing the right thing for MySQL, its community, or other open-source commercial efforts. Quite the opposite. Just as the commercial open-source community has been pondering a move back to community-controlled open source, the EC threatens to hobble the shift.
The EC may well end up with less competition, not more, by blocking Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun and its crown jewel, MySQL.
Novell has been positioning itself as the Avis of Linux, a distant but gaining Red Hat competitor that "tries harder." Like Oracle, Novell argues that it can give customers Red Hat value at a lower price.
What, me worry?
It's true that adoption of unpaid Linux like CentOS is booming, and that this no-cost alternative to more expensive solutions like Red Hat is a real threat to Red Hat. This is no doubt why Red Hat has made "free-to-paid" a core element of its ongoing strategy, as related in its recent earnings call.
But it's a much bigger threat to Novell and Oracle, both of whom are trying to position themselves as cheaper alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
If a customer really wants Red Hat at a lower price, they're not going to move to an incompatible distribution that may or may not run their applications properly. They're going to jump to CentOS, which is basically a carbon copy of RHEL, minus the trademarks (and price tag).
Oracle, for its part, is clearly not in the Linux market. It's in the market to eradicate Red Hat, so as to claim top-to-bottom control of its software stack. But even as Oracle tries to squeeze Red Hat into oblivion, CentOS provides an excellent hedge against commercial competition from Oracle (and Novell), making its pitch ring hollow.
CentOS: Red Hat's biggest annoyance and greatest friend?
It's not dissimilar to the role that piracy plays for protecting Microsoft's Windows dominance against Linux, especially in emerging markets. Quite possibly the worst thing that Microsoft could do, as IDC has also suggested, is to succeed in its anti-piracy efforts.
Were Microsoft to raise its pricing above $0.00 in such markets, suddenly Linux would look like a much better alternative.
Back to Novell and Oracle. It's not enough to try harder. Red Hat has created a dominant global brand that CIOs trust. It's not worth a few dollars here and there to disrupt that to shift to SUSE or Oracle Enterprise Linux.
Not when those CIOs can shave 100 percent of their RHEL subscription costs by moving to CentOS.
I know some CIOs who have, but they tend to be enterprises with lots of developers that are comfortable supporting themselves. Fortunately for Red Hat, few CIOs care to take that risk. Unfortunately for Novell and Oracle, those who do want to save all of their Linux subscription fees, not just some of them.
Postgres for years has lived in the shadow of MySQL's media attention: the "boring" database that quietly goes about its work while its sexy Web 2.0 cousin wins the popularity contest.
Recent data from the Eclipse Foundation, however, suggest that Postgres may be ready to make significant waves in the enterprise, even if it doesn't make headlines.
In a recent letter to European Union's commissioner of competition, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos stressed that MySQL's target market is the emerging Web database market and that the enterprise IT market was never really a source of strength (or focus).
Postgres is the opposite.
Postgres is an enterprise Java database, more suitable for carrying corporate data than the Web's consumer data. According to a 2009 survey by the Eclipse Foundation, MySQL (27.7 percent) and Oracle (27.3 percent) were the top-two databases used by those surveyed, with Postgres registering a respectable but still distant 9.9 percent.
Given that Oracle database users are far more likely to use Java as their programming language to develop server-centric applications, while MySQL users are three times more likely to use PHP as their primary language (17.4 percent of those surveyed use it, versus 5.4 percent for all users) to builde RIA/Web applications, Postgres is clearly more Oracle than MySQL.
Granted, the Eclipse community is traditionally Java-centric, so it's not surprising that Java would be prominent among its developers. But it's also the case that enterprise IT remains a Java/.Net market, and in such a market Postgres could be poised to boom if it can muster sufficient marketing to make its message heard.
This is where EnterpriseDB comes in.
The MySQL community would not be as well-developed as it is without MySQL, the company. MySQL AB has funded the overwhelming majority of MySQL database development, but it has also provided the marketing muscle to make a name for the Web database.
Postgres has traditionally been a standalone, organic open-source project with little concerted corporate involvement. EnterpriseDB has started to change that, but for too long wrongly fixated on competing with MySQL, a database that serves a different market and different developers. The company also spent too much time talking about Oracle migration technology, rather than focusing on why Postgres is a great database.
That may be changing.
Postgres just released version 8.4 of the venerable database. In EnterpriseDB's discussion of the release, there's no mention of Oracle, MySQL, or any other competitor. Instead, EnterpriseDB seems to be focusing more on its commitment to Postgres development, adding significant enterprise hardening through its open-source Postgres Plus distribution.
It's a welcome change, and one that could position Postgres to take a bigger share of the enterprise Java database market--not because it's cheaper than Oracle or more open than MySQL but because it's a great database in its own right.
That's the right messaging for EnterpriseDB...and Postgres.
Mårten Mickos
As the European Commission continues to evaluate the potentially deleterious effects of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems and its open-source MySQL database, concern is rising that delay will harm MySQL without helping competition.
One who shares this concern is former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos. On Thursday, Mickos sent a letter to Neelie Kroes, the European Union's competition commissioner, urging that the deal be approved for the good of the market and MySQL. He also spoke with CNET News' Stephen Shankland on Thursday.
Below is the edited full text of the letter.
Helsinki 8 Oct 2009
Mrs. Neelie Kroes
Commissioner for Competition
European Commission, J70
B-1049 Brussels/Brussel
BELGIQUE/BELGIE
Dear Commissioner Kroes,
I am writing to you regarding your review of Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems. As I understand it, the EU Commission is concerned about a risk of undue concentration of power in the database market. Having been the CEO of MySQL from 2001 to 2009, and built a business that was serving a new market unmet by Oracle and others, I can agree with the questions posed, but I do not share the concerns that have been expressed. In the following, I will explain why.
In brief, my reasoning is as follows:
- Oracle has as many compelling business reasons to continue the ramp-up of the MySQL business as Sun Microsystems and MySQL previously did, or even more.
- Even if Oracle, for whatever reason, would have malicious or ignorant intent regarding MySQL (not that I think so), the positive and massive influence MySQL has on the DBMS market cannot be controlled by a single entity--not even by the owner of the MySQL assets. The users of MySQL exert a more powerful influence in the market than the owner does.
Many expected Oracle to harm MySQL as far back as 2005, when they acquired the InnoDB storage engine that plays a crucial role for many MySQL customers. And yet Oracle increased their investment in InnoDB since that time, making MySQL a stronger player in the market.
For further detail on my views on Oracle's intent, please see this interview with me in Forbes Magazine in April 2009.
It may at first blush seem counterintuitive that control of the MySQL assets does not automatically bestow control of the MySQL installed base. But the free installed base of MySQL--enormous on a planetary scale--is voluntarily but not mandatorily coupled to the commercial market of MySQL. It produces huge benefits to the MySQL business, but it is not controlled by it.
Background
The impetus to write this letter comes from my concern with the talented teams of the MySQL business unit and of Sun Microsystems in general. I am also troubled by certain factual distortions about a subject matter that I am intimately familiar with: MySQL and its business model. Open-source business models are complicated and quite different, and it took many years to fully understand and shape the one of MySQL.
A Finnish citizen, I served as chief executive officer of MySQL from early 2001 to February 2008, when Sun acquired MySQL. After that, I served as senior vice president of the database group at Sun until the end of March 2009. Being the only person to have served as the CEO of MySQL and to have attended every board meeting ever held, I believe I have unique insights into these matters.
To be clear, I resigned from my position in March 2009, and I presently have no commercial or financial interests in the MySQL ecosystem, Sun, or Oracle (or any other vendor in the DBMS market, for that matter), other than my loyalty to Sun employees in general and the MySQL team in particular.
MySQL's Markets and Installed Base
MySQL is the world's most popular open-source relational database, and potentially the most popular relational database of all. It has an enormous influence and impact on the usage and the buying patterns of relational databases (also known as RDBMSs), in particular for Web applications. One might even state that the Internet would not be what it is today, were it not for MySQL. Staffed by a highly talented team of passionate employees, the Swedish company MySQL grew the MySQL business from a small one in 2001 to a massive one in 2008.
"MySQL" refers to two things. On the one hand, there is the huge (community) phenomenon MySQL...On the other hand, there is the business of MySQL...Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.
In this discussion, the term "MySQL" refers to two things. On the one hand, there is the huge phenomenon MySQL--an estimated 12 million active installations under a free and open-source software license, millions, if not tens of millions, of skilled users and developers, and tens of thousands of corporations who use MySQL one way or the other.
On the other hand, there is the business of MySQL, which is growing rapidly, thus rewarding the owners of the assets (currently Sun Microsystems).
Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.
What I mean is that the vast and free installed base of MySQL is using it of their own free choice, unencumbered by the vendor and under no obligation or restraint. That is the nature of open source. And conversely, the MySQL business is supporting the free installed base of MySQL (by improving the product) voluntarily and in the hope of deriving benefit from the installed base.
This is the paradox of an open-source business, and it took me a long time to truly understand how powerful a force it is. It is unlike any traditional business. The key point is that both the users and the vendors of open source are engaged in a powerful free-market dynamic that cannot be contained by any single entity.
It is in everybody's interest that the two sides of MySQL produce benefit for and derive benefit from each other. But neither group can mandate or control the other one. This is a core philosophy of open-source software and more generally of the "architecture of participation" (as defined by Tim O'Reilly). There is a mutually beneficial voluntary relationship, but there is no control by one group over the other. In more colloquial terms: the owners of MySQL cannot force MySQL users to pay up, and the nonpaying users cannot force the business to subsidize them.
Anyone acquiring the MySQL assets will therefore acquire an ability to control the business aspect, i.e., meaning how MySQL is licensed commercially, but only an opportunity (and no free reign) to derive benefit from the free user base.
This explains how the MySQL business can be valued highly in the market ($1 billion, when acquired by Sun in February 2008) while at the same time providing no way of controlling its installed base. This unusual relationship between market share and installed base is at the core of the topic. The market share is small but controllable, to some degree. The installed base is enormous but not controllable. The installed base is, and can be, hugely beneficial to the owner of MySQL, but only to the extent and for as long as this owner of MySQL enjoys the trust of the installed base.
To put it in numbers, it may be useful to see the usage of MySQL, as divided into three categories:
... Read moreOracle is determined to keep MySQL if it acquires Sun, but the reason likely has little to do with open source and everything to do with Microsoft. Oracle doesn't compete with open source. Not really. Open source is simply a means to an end, and in the case of MySQL, a means to denting Microsoft's rising strength in emerging markets where Oracle's expensive database technology doesn't resonate.
In fact, in a recent survey by Evans Data, over 50 percent of developers in the emerging markets of China, India, Eastern Europe, and Latin America use Microsoft's SQL Server, compared to 46 percent using MySQL.
Oracle database technology? It's used, but not nearly as extensively.
MySQL gives Oracle a club with which to beat Microsoft. It's not about open source. It's about the MySQL developer community and its competitive price point, two things that Microsoft also has going for it. Arguably, though, open source provides Oracle a strong competitive differentiator against Microsoft in these markets.
Even so, I think we'll eventually see open source aiding both sides in this battle, as Microsoft learns to drop its acrimonious stance toward open source and instead strategically embrace it, as IBM, Oracle, and others have done before it.
Oracle can't afford to abandon MySQL. It's the key to unlocking its ability to effectively compete with Microsoft in tomorrow's big markets.
Open-source advocates need to get their stories straight. Are we a big-tent movement, or a parochial club that is hell-bent on limiting membership...and efficacy? Unfortunately, it increasingly seems that the open-source community is determined to be the latter, and has taken positions on various events that are out of keeping with the founding principles of open source.
Take Microsoft. The company has long been a controversial figure in open source, as well as in the broader technology industry, and for good reason. Conviction for abusing monopoly power will do that to you.
But Microsoft has spent the past few years extending an olive branch to the open-source community, only to be criticized, questioned, and rebuffed. Last week the software giant created the CodePlex Foundation, designed "to enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open-source communities." The foundation has assembled a solid core of directors and advisors, including Stephen Walli and Monty Widenius (formerly of MySQL).
"I don't believe it for a minute," thunders Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, speculating that "Microsoft doesn't mind stealing from open source, but any deals it makes are only good while there's a clear, short-term benefit to Microsoft." This is probably true, but it's equally true of every profit-seeking company on this planet, minus the emotionally-charged (and inaccurate) term "steal."
Do Google, IBM, SAP, Jive, MySQL, Red Hat, etc., use open source to advance their self-interest? You bet they do. They have a fiduciary duty to do exactly that. And do they selectively adopt open source without always contributing back? Of course.
Let's face it: no one--even open-source community contributors--writes open-source software purely out of the goodness of their hearts. This shouldn't be a surprise: open-source luminary Eric Raymond wrote about it over a decade ago.
But it's telling that Microsoft is the company singled out, more often than not. It is very likely that Microsoft could open source every line of its code and still be treated like a pariah by the open-source community.
Or, rather, by a vocal segment of that community. It's the part that doesn't have to meet a payroll. Perhaps the sort of person that Hugh MacLeod was referencing in a tweet he made: "It's easy to spot a purist. They're the ones without any skin in the game."
When your only job is to yell down others, you don't need to pay much attention to what you say.
But Microsoft isn't the only company to get pilloried. Oracle gets its fair share of abuse, too, and often enough on this blog. It seems that abuse is proportional to one's income statement, and the potential to abuse one's market position to the detriment of customers, as BusinessWeek recently wrote of Oracle.
Hence, ever since Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun and, hence, MySQL, some within the open-source community have been wringing their hands at a frenetic pace. "Oracle will kill MySQL!" they moan.
Gartner rubbishes this concern, insisting that "the fact of the matter is (Oracle) cannot destroy the (MySQL) product." It's licensed under the GNU General Public License, after all, which preserves the freedom to fork the code. In fact, MySQL has been forked several times already.
This isn't to suggest that Oracle couldn't damage MySQL by slowing its development, or shutting down internal development altogether. Of course it could: Sun/MySQL employs the overwhelming majority of developers who write MySQL. To control them is to control the code.
But if there's any truth to open source's claims that it provides freedom (through the right to fork), then owning MySQL, the company, shouldn't be tantamount to owning MySQL, the code, and Monty Widenius, and others could merrily pick up where Oracle left off.
That is, assuming we really believe open source is a liberating force. Do we?
I do. That's why I don't worry about Oracle's impact on MySQL. Heck, I figure Red Hat or someone would simply hire the MySQL engineers and start MySQL II if Oracle attempts to kill the project (which I don't think it has any intention to do).
It's also why I welcome, not reject, Microsoft's attempts to open itself to open source. Those with no skin in the game find it easy to point fingers and malign others' imperfect attempts to engage. They forget that it's hard for closed-source companies to open up, as SAP's Dirk Riehle writes, but with the incentives to open up increasingly visible, companies will find a way.
We should be encouraging them to do so, not second-guessing their every move. And we should recognize that there are times when the open-source alternative is not ready to displace a proprietary incumbent, as Esther Schindler notes, which means that we're going to need to learn to get along for many, many years.
I'm not suggesting that Microsoft or Oracle has been perfect. But don't believe that IBM, Red Hat, Alfresco, MySQL, or (insert vendor of choice) has been perfect, either. Each of us is making this up as we go along. Sometimes we screw up, but that doesn't mean it's intentional.
Oracle has much to say to Sun Microsystems customers in a front-page advertisement it placed in Thursday's European edition of The Wall Street Journal.
The advertisement commits to greater investments in Sun hardware and Solaris software, but has absolutely nothing to say about MySQL. Is this a necessary omission to appease European regulators, or is it a sign of Oracle's intentions?
In the advertisement, Oracle commits to the following:
(Credit:
Oracle)
IBM, which has been cleaning up at Sun's expense, gets a warning from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: "We're in it to win it. IBM, we're looking forward to competing with you in the hardware business."
Sun's business has tanked in the ongoing uncertainty over Oracle's takeover bid. The advertisement is clearly intended to placate customers that might otherwise flee to the apparent security of a relationship with IBM or Hewlett-Packard.
It's interesting, therefore, that Oracle gives no assurances about MySQL. This could simply be a politic action designed to sidestep the ire of the European Union, which has been investigating the effects an Oracle acquisition might have on Sun's MySQL business.
Or it could simply be a recognition that assuaging the fears of MySQL's customers is a comparatively unimportant task. MySQL was doing roughly $100 million in sales at the time Sun acquired the company. Given that Sun stands to lose billions in its hardware business the longer the Oracle bid drags on, losing a few tens of millions from MySQL is pocket change.
Besides, it's not at all clear that Oracle's decision to snag Sun has done anything to slow MySQL adoption. A vocal minority within the open-source development community has wrung its hands over the deal, but I've yet to hear MySQL's customer base, which skews toward the technology-savvy Web crowd, fretting about Oracle's impact on MySQL's business.
Oracle's advertisement is designed to shore up confidence in the CIO crowd that still buys Sun and probably has no clue that their organizations are running MySQL throughout the enterprise. At some point they'll know. But by that time, Oracle's acquisition of Sun should be complete.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
