If Oracle Bought Every Open Source Company 237
An anonymous reader points out Glyn Moody's thought experiment: what if Oracle bought up the entire open source ecosystem? Who would win, who would lose? And how might an open ecosystem grow in the wake of such an event? "Recently, there was an interesting rumour circulating that Oracle had a war chest of some $70 billion, and was going on an acquisition spree. Despite the huge figure, it had a certain plausibility, because Oracle is a highly successful company with deep pockets and an aggressive management. The rumour was soon denied, but suppose Oracle decided to spend, if not $70 billion, say $10 billion in an efficient way: how might it do that? One rather dramatic use of that money would be to buy up the leading open source companies — all of them."
Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you'd get $10 Billion dollars worth of Forks starting off the last release, and everything would be the same as usual, except that Oracle would have acquired a lot of software.
It would cause a ripple for a while, like it has with MySQL, but trust me, in time - we'll have found another FOSS solution. The same thing would happen elsewhere.
More FOSS would fork from the bought up projects (Score:5, Insightful)
Because of that, it would be very difficult for Oracle to monetize their purchases. Certainly to the degree that made any sort of financial sense and maybe not to the satisfaction of the shareholders.
Re:Some areas would have no interest (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with that is since they are Open Source, the project forks and continues on Business as Usual. Look at MySQL for an example. Even if the codebase officially known as MySQL withers on the vine, there's still at least 2 forks I can think of that are viable.
OSS Programmers Finally Get A Payday (Score:3, Insightful)
Do they need "all of them"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Buying "all" open source companies would be a bit over-dramatic, but I could see perhaps a few strategic buys. For instance, buying RedHat. Oracle has their own respin of RHEL, but rather than being at the mercy of the release schedule a la CentOS, buying RH would give them more control over the pace of things, not to mention getting a lot of major contributors on the books. RedHat also owns JBoss, which might be worth their time and money to acquire, too. I doubt that it'd happen though, which is probably a good thing.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Suddenly (Score:5, Insightful)
a large portion aren't buy-able (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle can only really effectively buy open-source companies of the MySQL variety: where the vast majority of development is done by one, medium-sized, for-profit company closely associated with the project. Stretching a little more, they can buy multi-project companies on the lower end of "large" that do a lot of open-source development, like Sun.
But a lot of open-source is done by groups that deviate to either side of that. Either they're more distributed open-source projects with no central entity to buy in the first place, or they're run by very large companies that Oracle couldn't possibly buy, like Google and IBM.
Re:Impossible to do (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As an Oracle DBA (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
You DO get IP, even if it's free software. Even with the GPL, you could stop distributing old versions and re-license future versions if you control the copyright. Open source projects aren't alone in having employees that will leave in an acquisition, and it's clear that whether everyone leaves after an acquisition is almost entirely dependent on the specifics of the deal. You get revenue from support contracts, and your customers aren't going to switch to a new branch just because of a change in ownership if the new owners are sympathetic, and a new branch may not even come about.
Yeah, there's risk that any of your problems could happen but everyday business is a risk too.
Re:Hi. I'm an open-source developer. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What If . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
What if squirrels had wings and shot cruise missiles out of their tail?
Well, that would be awesome, obviously.
sun buyout (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:As an Oracle DBA (Score:5, Insightful)
You must be a salesperson. I'm not a technology zealot, but Oracle is by far the most superior product in the market for mid ot large size datasets serving mid to large size queries (carefully chosen words
Now MS has the exact same yammering salespeople who drive me nuts when they tout the strength of their package, but I've explored it with the intimate detail that only a DBA can.
Read my lips: Its crap.
When you start to pull away from the sales pitch, super easy install, and drop and go fascade, you quickly unveil a half working SQL engine, a busted backup model, and an internal engine that turns itself into muck heaven forbid if anybody hit it with any sort of large query.
Sorry, its the Oracle DBMS engine that has made them the big bucks. Don't even get me started on Oracle forms and reports.
'Open'Solaris dying (Score:3, Insightful)
At this point, the last release was June 2009. Development has stopped being exposed to the outside world, we were expecting a May release, and we're going on August now. There still has not been official announcement by Oracle on this topic either.
While OpenSolaris is not a true open source product, it has been mistreated since the Oracle take over. It is unclear why there has been nothing said on it, but I'd rather take a project death at this point than this continued silence. Several key people have left to move onto other projects as well, though others are saying that development is still continuing. And worst of all, it would be a pain in the ass to fork because of their particular license design choice.
The forums [opensolaris.org] have been rather full of people complaining about it as well. Especially after the OpenSolaris board has threatened to kill itself off [cnet.com] if Oracle doesn't make some key decisions.
Just bad news all around. And it would be so easy to fix too, just by giving us an official statement on it's future.
Re:As an Oracle DBA (Score:3, Insightful)
And Oracle in version 7 had a character based installer that didn't require X. And there's still no good reason for Oracle to require X for installation and installation alone.
forking doesn't solve all the problems (Score:5, Insightful)
i'm very tired of hearing "i'll just fork", or "you can't buy an open source project" whenever this comes up.
most OSS projects are heavily funded by commercial outlets, and most often its a single outlet. you can buy an OSS project by buying the developers, or in other words buying the mindshare. whether they quit after the acquisition with bonuses tied to no-compete clauses, or whether they stay on and get put onto other projects, they are gone for the most part.
sure, it's theoretically possible that a troupe of new developers will swoop in and carry on, but that just doesn't happen, in most cases. developers are not 100% portable. that means that it takes a gifted developer to come in and take over a code base designed by someone else. in most cases, you get spot fixes that don't see the overall vision, resulting in increasing bugs and a code base that eventually must be re-written.
and, you rarely get gifted developers with such an interest. working with someone else's vision is not fun. building your own vision is. why would a gifted developer use their nights and weekends to carry on someone else's vision?
Re:Hi. I'm an open-source developer. (Score:1, Insightful)
I'll start my bidding by suing for $675,000 in damages to my intellectual property.
Frankly, you'd have to be bonkers to enter the US business market these days. The lawyers have made it impossible to move forward.
Re:Impossible to do (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. For some people, OSS is like a crusade, but for many others (most of the people doing the heavy lifting, especially at companies that would be bought) I'm betting it's a paycheck.
For a "mere" $10 billion dollars you could just pay key people a few million each to stop working on products in whatever field and you'd have exactly the same kind of smothering effect on things as you would if you spent $70 billion to buy out the companies.
For anyone who isn't ideologically driven to the extreme or independently wealthy, I'm going to say being offered $1-10 million to work on something else or even just stop working would be _quite_ effective.
Re:Some areas would have no interest (Score:2, Insightful)
Aren't you supposed to tell us that GIMP does not support CMYK? I thought, Microsoft doesn't pay those who don't include dissing GIMP and OpenOffice into every comment, or at least proclaim their love for Linux before spewing their anti-open-source propaganda.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just their programmers - but also their customer base.
Despite the anarchistic "Everyman is own IT department" fantasies of the FOSS movement, most companies and individuals just want something that works. The days when every business, large and small, had to have management, staff, and gurus to roll their own and keep them rolling are viewed with horror as the 'bad old days'. The idea that the software that keeps their business ticking depends on 'some guy in a basement' and his friends are viewed as equally terrifying. (Which is why these FOSS companies exist in the first place.)
Slashdot (and by extension the FOSS movement) really needs to realize that in the real world, people and businesses don't jump to forks for political reasons and in fact are cautious about changing things at because the costs (in actual money) and disruptions that accompany such jumps.
Re:As an Oracle DBA (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Impossible to do (Score:1, Insightful)
i have seen this ideal pushed in previous posts and i have yet to see one of the largest blocks to the tactic presented.
if oracle or any other market leading company started spending billions, or even millions paying off individuals to just stop working on projects or to come over to there side, very very quickly we would see the EFF and probably individual projects throwing out million and billion dollar anti-trust suits.
no company (that has a large market share, or is about to) would be able to make that large of a number of purchases without attracting attention and the lawyer for damn sure know it will get regulators attention and will advise against such action.
AC by trade, douche by birth, take it how you want /.'ers
Re:Quick question (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it's much more fun watching SCO go bankrupt.