Thursday, April 17. 2008
Open Source getting goosed - whats the SQL?
It is with some regret I read of the emergence of good old Olde Worlde economics into the Open Source bubbleworld. From Computing:
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:
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
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
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It goes even deeper than just the open source SQL world IMO - now why would any open source coder help with Sun's other projects.
Ruby and Python are becoming big in the Sun internal world - what's next for their buy-n-hide mentality?
Ruby and Python are becoming big in the Sun internal world - what's next for their buy-n-hide mentality?
Deeper than that even - If I were an Open Source coder now I'd be wanting a bit more clarity about the endgame of any O/S project I was in - who owns it, whats the charter etc - or else you risk being not just a code monkey, but just an unpaid one..
OSS people are usually pretty good at knowing what license (GNU/GPL/etc) they're working under; so far, Sun has been careful to check with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) that their actions are all in line with MySQL (GPLv2, if not mistaken). It's difficult not to sympathise with either party here - on the one hand, Sun has bought a product which 999/1000 users do not pay a penny for; and it has taken nothing away from the community, which still has one of the most approachable, useful database systems - which it created - in its toolkit with no new costs or learning demands strictly placed on them post acquisition. Sun is seeking to squeeze money out of its Enterprise products on the MySQL line. Whilst it would be impressive, to say the least, to see enterprises collaborating on tech innovation that anyone can use, I doubt that most MySQL developers had truly enterprise products in mind when designing MySQL - so is really profiting at their expense by branching off enterprise products and seekiing to profit from them?
If the linked blog post is truly representative of the 'fury' this has caused (a man who spends 90% of his post describing how PostgreSQL is an inferior product, then 10% to say he's angry and is going to switch... to PostgreSQL; without once saying why); I suspect mountain and molehill may describe the situation best.
Opensource is a luxury in a post-scarcity generation, but one we can afford at present, and one that's doing great stuff for the end user, you and I (and for the IT businesses saving 60 billion a year). It's probably no bad thing to see them endocytosed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocytosis) - just frees up the OSS developers to try something new, something better. It's not a bad circle of life, so long as the acquisition process doesn't totally put off developers from getting involved in the next OSS project that comes along.
If the linked blog post is truly representative of the 'fury' this has caused (a man who spends 90% of his post describing how PostgreSQL is an inferior product, then 10% to say he's angry and is going to switch... to PostgreSQL; without once saying why); I suspect mountain and molehill may describe the situation best.
Opensource is a luxury in a post-scarcity generation, but one we can afford at present, and one that's doing great stuff for the end user, you and I (and for the IT businesses saving 60 billion a year). It's probably no bad thing to see them endocytosed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocytosis) - just frees up the OSS developers to try something new, something better. It's not a bad circle of life, so long as the acquisition process doesn't totally put off developers from getting involved in the next OSS project that comes along.
Phil, Sun bought it in the clear knowledge of what it was, and thus its economics.
As to the link, I used it more to illustratte the strategic risk, which is that these guys don't work in a contractual mode.
Big picture for OS, as for any of these voluntary "UGC" plays, is not the licence per se but the governance, and the dynamic of what happens to O/S if you realise that the deal can be "you work for free and other guys walk off with ethe loot".
As to the link, I used it more to illustratte the strategic risk, which is that these guys don't work in a contractual mode.
Big picture for OS, as for any of these voluntary "UGC" plays, is not the licence per se but the governance, and the dynamic of what happens to O/S if you realise that the deal can be "you work for free and other guys walk off with ethe loot".
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