Comments on: It's OK to be an open-source flip-flopper

Open source has been a political battle for far too long. The current fear to change a business model to reflect customer and market realities can be debilitating.

[vikinzer]

I agree with you overall, but I have to say I do with you hadn't gone right for the Richard Stallman reference. While I am a firm believer in being a pragmatist with a sprinkling of ideology, I have listened to Richard Stallman. The man is right about pretty much all of his reasons for doing things, and he is willing to make the personal sacrifices to keep to his ideology. While his model is by no means right for everyone, or for that matter the vast majority of everyone it is important that some people beat the ideological drum.

If Stallman hadn't created the GPL, and pushed forward the free software movement the pragmatists probably never would have gotten ahold of it to create Free Software. You need the hard core people to really come up with something because they aren't always worrying about the pros and cons and how to make it perfect. Then what they create others refine. It's just the way of the world. Stallman is a creator, and Ray Ozzie is a refiner. While we may be moving into a stage of maturity with open source that requires more pragmatism without the purists we might never have gotten the AGPL, something I think is violently necessary to keep companies like Google from becoming companies like Microsoft in the long term.

[vikinzer]

And of course I always see errors after I post. I meant gotten ahold of it to create open source. You can't exactly take free software and make free software out of it and claim to have done much of anything.

[kast5089]

I think Matt has it right. I'm so sick of the open source apologists who focus entirely on the politics of open source rather than the technology. I think open source is a better development and it's ultimately better for the consumer, but I do NOT think free software is a human right or a religion.

Stallman may have gotten the GPL off the ground, but he's largely become irrelevant now and he knows it. The FSF's antics do more damage to FOSS's reputation than help it and their outright hostility to proprietary platforms and vendors creates unnecessary obstacles to open source adoption.

[opnsrcguy]

Another great piece, Matt. Technologies should be valued on ability to deliver, functionality, TCO, and upfront cost. There are plenty of people are first to point fingers at companies with a hybrid approach as "not open source". The reality is, if your source code is freely available, you are open source. There are plenty of "socialists" who insist that for a company to be open source, it's product has to be "free".

The ones who complain the loudest, in my experience, are consultants. These guys have the mentality of "it's okay for me to make money from your product, just not you." Just ask those companies to significantly discount their services, let alone give them away for free.

If you product is good and you can develop a following, good for you. I think open source is the target of many right now purely because the commercial products finally have a reason to be nervous for the first time in years. The open source community is turning out mature, viable products, and the companies will really have a good reason to come to drink at the OSS fountains due to the climate.

Watch out commercial offerings... a new day is coming... soon... All you companies who are paying hundreds of thousands in maintenance for solutions you paid 7 or 8 figures on, you have reason to start looking. This is a new day focused on value and the big dogs are getting scared.

[henrikingo]

Hi Matt

I fully agree with flip-flopping, I never understood US politics for this aspect of it. (Some other aspects of it too, I guess :-) Personally, I consider it a point of pride to admit asap that I may have been wrong on some point and change my mind as much as is necessary.

It was interesting to read you saying explicitly that you *were* a part of the purists camp, I've been trying to understand your blog posts over the last 2 years and interpreted them exactly like that, but wasn't sure if I was reading you correctly. Further, it seems the 1 billion USD paid for MySQL coincides with your change of opinion here :-)

Anyway, while I fully accept your right to be a flip-flopper, I don't agree with everything that you and similarly "business" minded people read into Open Source. This sentence strikes a nerve: "to enable a revenue stream more consistent with its massive popularity".

How do you - or anyone - know what is the appropriate amount of revenue consistent with massive popularity? Perhaps the whole point of Open Source is that you can have millions of users that don't pay anyone a dime for using it. It is of course an interesting business excercise to figure out how you can make money on your popularity, but as a premise we shouldn't assume that there is any such revenue. I always make this point inside MySQL: While our big userbase is of course a big pool of potential customers, this is not the primary signifigance of a user community or an Open Source community. And even if Sun is the "owner" of MySQL, in Open Source, it is not an "us" vs "them" situation.

So I fully accept the right of Open Source purists to reject the Open Core model. It is not Open Source and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. For instance in the case of MySQL, we already can see it is just a matter of time before 3rd parties start developing Open Source alternatives to our closed source "differentiated features". When that happens, then what do we do with our business model?

But I also admit the world is not black and white. Our Enterprise features are also what customers pay for. One time a customer started a sales visit quite frankly: We are happy to pay for MySQL, but for us to do that, we want to see some shiny enterprisey features that we get for that money.

It's not what I - a purist to some degree - would have said, but it is what that customer said and many other say more indirectly. And we give those customers what they want.

[pentest]

There is some truth to what you say, but if you alienate your community you risk losing a lot and end up competition against yourself.

Just ask Tenable.