Sun CEO: Open source = free advertising
There are many reasons to love open-source software, but Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz thinks that one of its biggest benefits is free advertising. As Schwartz suggests, developers don't spend money. They spend time. That time spent with your technology, then, equates to free advertising, which advertising can presumably be be leveraged deeper into a developers' organization:
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)[W]e freely distribute our key software assets all over the world [because] if we didn't...users and developers might pick someone else's free product (or simply use the one they assume to be free). And if they picked someone else's product on which to build their business or their application, Sun becomes a reseller - which isn't our mission or business model....
By being freely distributed, our products build their own audiences. And using the products, from Glassfish to ZFS or NetBeans, creates a branding experience (and a wildly positive one, if we're doing our jobs well). So why don't we advertise in traditional outlets? Well, every day, the number of people using our products, getting that positive branding experience, eclipses nearly all major newspapers globally, combined.
This makes Sun's $1 billion acquisition of widely distributed MySQL more understandable, but only if Sun has a way to turn all that "free advertising" into "paid adoption." So far, however, it, and every other open-source company, continues to tinker with the right model for turning downloads into dollars. Schwartz plans to address this topic in an imminent blog entry, but the real question will be whether he can do so in the market.
I think, however, that his reasoning is correct. Incumbent vendors have an interest in reaping the harvest from existing customers. Everyone else, however, has an interest in sowing new opportunities. Given that most vendors, most of the time, need new customers, open source offers a highly efficient way of "advertising" to them, to use Schwartz's nomenclature.
The real question, then, is how to turn this advertising into sales. But that's fodder for another post, both for me and for Schwartz.
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Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
this is exactly what we do in the Lifecycle Marketing group at Sun. But no doubt Jonathan will describe this in a future posting.
--Zack
Regarding the other commercial Open Source companies, they haven't figured out how to motivate their commercial customers to both contribute new work _and_ pay for the privilege. Funny how those companies find it easier to contribute to Linux, Apache, Eclipse, etc., which don't ask them to pay for the privilege.
This is just fine for Open Source, most of it is created in cost centers rather than profit centers and isn't concerned with the commercial Open Source companies. But there is a tightrope that commercial Open Source companies have to walk if they are to survive, and most of them aren't showing any sign of doing so. Part of the problem is too-high expectations. The revenues they're supposed to bring in just aren't possible for that sort of business.
The key technical contributors are still with MySQL, the folks who left were the ones who were obstructing progress, not driving it. A lot of us are happy with our new management :-)
Second, Sun's overall software business dwarfs MySQL (it's like a billion dollars), and is entirely based on open source distribution. The notion that "part of the problem is too-high expectations" is false. A free product converted to revenue should have a higher market value than a constrained product, given the scale of market it reaches (all of it vs. some of it).
You guys lost Monty, the main author of the database, and Marten. You can be as happy with your job as you want, I'm not clear that will help MySQL as a business. Sun has already written off part of what it paid for the company, which hardly bodes well.
Historically, Sun has not done a good job of building Open Source communities. OpenOffice is a glaring example. It should be the number two program in importance after the Linux kernel, and the list of active contributors outside of Sun has always been quite small.
The two main things that have banjaxed OOo are the contributor copyright reassignment requirement and the impenetrable monolith that is the source-code itself. Even though MySQL has always had the first handicap it still seems to attract a reasonable level of contribution. I've never looked at its code myself but the contribution sources and the ease of dissecting the code itself probably play an important part.
You're right in that the chief architect leaving could present significant problems but I should think Sun has enough experienced developers to reduce the level of disruption this will cause.
Mind you, this is working on the assumption that they've learned from the mistakes they made with OOo/StarOffice.
- by bolero12 March 11, 2009 5:54 PM PDT
- @Bruce, first, whoever told you either Marten or Monty were active in determining development priorites never worked at MySQL. Neither were.
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(6 Comments)And from where I sit, OpenOffice reaches more users on earth than any other open source product (I just read 3,000,000 new users each week). MySQL hasn't done so badly, either, even though we're more restrictive to manage customer quality. So I'm not sure I'd consider those failures, it all depends upon your measure of success.
Glad to hear you got your mortgage covered.