Open Source

I have written a few articles recently on the increasing commercialisation of the Open Source world (see here for example) and not everyone is happy with this

However, in my defence, its not just me commenting on the trend - Nick Carr writes about Linux today:

There's nothing particularly surprising in the shift from the volunteer to the corporate model - it tends to be what happens when lots of money enters the picture - but it does reveal that while Net-based "social production" efforts may be unprecedented in their scale and unusual in their technology-mediated structure, they are no more immune, or even resistant, to being incorporated into established market systems than any other type of labor that produces commercially valuable goods. The shift in Linux kernel development from unpaid to paid labor, from volunteers to employees, suggests that the Net doesn't necessarily weaken the hand of central management or repeal old truths about business organization.

No doubt not everyone will be happy with Nick either

It is with some regret I read of the emergence of good old Olde Worlde economics into the Open Source bubbleworld. From Computing:

Officials at Sun Microsystems Inc., which acquired MySQL in February, confirmed that new online backup capabilities now under development will be offered only to MySQL Enterprise customers — not to the much larger number of users of the free MySQL Community edition.

The plan was detailed during meetings at MySQL's annual user conference in Santa Clara, Calif., during which Sun also delayed until late June the release of a MySQL 5.1 upgrade in order to iron out some remaining bugs.

This is the second dust-up between MySQL and its users in the past eight months. Last August, an earlier decision to stop making the MySQL Enterprise source code openly available to users without paid subscriptions drew criticism from some members of the MySQL community.

In other words, so long and thanks for all the long free hours, guys, but its our toy now.......... I bet that makes all those contrbutors over the years want to really get up and help tomorrow morning.

Not that this wasn't all predictable of course (here we are predicting it for example), just sad to see it happen. The real lesson of these collaborative work projects is that too often, eventually a small cadre of people seem to grab the project, grab all the loot, and run off with it - and the dispersed, disorganised and dispossessed "community" can do little about it.

However, the risk Sun takes in messing with the LAMP architecture stack is that it misunderstands not the mood of the community, but the impact of a kickback:

....user Paul Saduauskas threatened to abandon MySQL in favor of rival open-source databases in response to the hoarding of features for the enterprise version. For instance, Saduauskas said that the PostgreSQL database is "fast enough these days" and is "much more standards-compliant" than MySQL is....

...."Free software developers (including myself) are a fickle bunch, and can jump ship or fork a project with startling speed."

A lot of those free installations out there are driven by sentimental, not contractual, value - replacing MySQL with a new OS system would be a labour of love if Sun p*ssed all these people off - or even worse, if the companies using it felt that they would have to pay for support in the future, or be held over a barrel.

And the impact is more subtle than Sun may be expecting, as there is a system dynamic going on here - if people no longer love MySQL, it means collaborative community support goes away, which means more risk for any one user, which means a need to de-risk, which, allied to (i) a righteous indignation plus (ii) an opportunity to play with cool new stuff, could lead to a -ve cycle for MySQL quite rapidly.

And once its out the LAMP stack, w(h)ither then?

Jus' Saying......

Update - it appears Slashdot's finest, me and Computerworld woz wrong re Sun's intentions, or at least Sun has clarified matters here ...and here .... and here ....457 comments later and counting

Well, one way is to write a report on it and charge $1,000 a throw for the report

"Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group International"

I'd have been more comfortable with a range of values though......I can't believe that at this stage this isn't a hugely SWAG game

Thanks for link to Simon Wardley