Agriya

1. Is Open Source a Force No Longer?

   sujata on December 11th, 2009

   Tags: free, mysql, open source, oracle

   MySQL in many ways, exemplifies the spirit of open source, the crusade for freedom of knowledge, where a talented programmer comes up with a useful piece of software, and releases it to the world to use and modify at no obligation. MySQL was the first product of a particular fledgling venture; the database application was an instant hit, and talented software professionals contributed to its code, extending its function base and its stability, often doing it for no greater reward than a chance to hit back at Microsoft and Oracle. MySQL is installed on millions of computers worldwide; still, the founders never asked anyone to pay for the non-free version that offered the additional benefit of customer support. MySQL later sold itself to Sun, and now Sun is being absorbed by Oracle. The European Commission does not like it at all seeing such a socially useful product disappear into a multinational corporation.

   MySQL may be a great product that helps society; many examples of software exist, Facebook and Firefox being good ones, that society could not do without. But putting a figure on their financial value would be difficult. In today’s tough economic environment a part of the world’s businesses would close down if they did not have access to a good free alternative: Linux instead of Windows, OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office and so on. MySQL’s new owner, Oracle, promises to keep MySQL free, and to keep developing it, if only as a way to keep Microsoft’s SQL Server from getting any market traction. Does open source software have any intrinsic financial worth though, when it isn’t being used as a pawn in a business game? Red Hat is the one and only example of profitable open-source.

   But open source is taking on corporate shades these days much more quickly than it has been taking on populist shades. It is not grassroots programmer contributions and popular use by everyday folk that is propping up Mozilla and Linux these days; it is Google, Oracle, Intel and IBM. These mega corporations pay the programmers and managers at these open source ventures the best salaries to keep them interested. In many cases they’re buying the open source ventures outright. It would appear that the open source movement has almost completely failed or disappeared. They don’t run on mere goodwill. Could it have been the plan all along that the major corporations, that they could buy up the open sourcers and then quietly phase them out?

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 6:23 am and is filed under Internet News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.