We all know what happens when a big company comes in and takes over a popular open source project.
It's not pretty.
What happened to Java, OpenOffice and Solaris under Oracle was not pretty, but the community did all it could about it. Those projects had already been under a big company, Sun Microsystems, so Oracle's takeover was something in the natural order of things.
What we may soon see, however, what we're starting to see, are big companies taking on support of projects that already have a corporate sponsor. A small company devoted to the code that has been fighting to monetize it suddenly looks up and finds a giant hovering over it. The cat eating the mouse becomes food for the coyote.
Revolution Analytics recently found itself in this position. The corporate sponsor of the R big data language recently found out that Oracle will be offering support for R in its data center offerings.
David Smith, the company's vice president of marketing and community, doesn't feel like the cat before the coyote, however.
Bans against reverse engineering, like the one recently announced by Microsoft's Skype unit, are the latest front in the open source vs. proprietary war.
There is little doubt that the law is on Skype's side. As with the whole question of business patents, this is court-made law that legislators are unlikely to overturn. The case is Bowers vs. Baystate Technologies, and it used Massachusetts law to create something like the failed UCITA, legalizing bans.
UCITA, for those who don't remember, was an effort early in this century to impose bans on reverse-engineering under state laws across the country. Activists fought it back. But before they could celebrate their victory, the Court of Appeals for the Federal District, which is generally the high court for patent cases, lowered the boom on everyone.
When you keep people from reverse-engineering something, you are explicitly preventing them from looking at how it works. You are explicitly preventing them from inventing a way around it.
By its nature, open source reduces distribution costs to zero and marketing costs to near-zero. Even when an open source company has a sales department they're not really selling. They are converting. They are trying to turn people who have already downloaded and started using the software into paying customers. Their success is determined, in large part, by the prospect's success in getting value from the software.
In other words, the stuff sells itself.
Market analysis is not journalism. It's marketing. Analysts look for opportunities on behalf of buyers and sellers in a marketplace. They sell this knowledge in order to build markets. But what is there to sell if buyers can just download the stuff, and sellers are just converting users into buyers?
Long story short, open source is a direct threat to market research. Typical market research processes don't work in the open source market. Sure, you can get gross comparisons of lots of open source projects, to help you decide which one to put your time and money into. For a company of size this is valuable stuff. But the typical “magic quadrant” analysis just doesn't have a market. Sorry.
Rather than acknowledge this reality, firms like Forrester, Gartner and IDC dance past it, or pretend it's not real. They don't train their people to understand open source because there's not enough money in it – for them. So they don't know it. And they probably never will.
There has always been a political divide in open source between Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) advocates and pure open source advocates.
It's reflected in the personalities of Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond. Stallman's politics are leftist, Raymond's are conservative. This is reflected in the nature of the licenses they support. Stallman's “fourth freedom,” embodied in the GPL, is that you are free to get code improvements. Raymond's, embodied in BSD-like licenses of all types, is that you're free to make money from code.
You can think of Stallman as Catholic and Raymond as Protestant if you want, but their divide goes beyond mere licensing, into the nature of the open source process itself.
Apache's assertion of OpenOffice as an Apache podlink illustrates the problem, one I think Oracle CEO Larry Ellison set up deliberately in his treatment of the code. True code believers had long ago set up The Document Foundation under the banner of LibreOffice, which has an LGPL license. But Apache has agreed to use its own BSD-like Apache license for its version of the code, and asserts that it has money, and talent, needed to drive the code forward.
Lawyers from Apple have been on a global winning streak against Samsung's Galaxy tablet. The latest win came in Australia, where a judge stopped the product's import over a patent personally filed by the late Steve Jobs.
To Florian this is a really big deal.
After today's decision, I believe no company in the industry be able to launch any new Android-based touchscreen product in Australia anytime soon without incurring a high risk of another interim injunction. The two patents on which today's ruling is based aren't Galaxy Tab 10.1-specific at all. They will affect all Android-based smartphones and tablet computers, across all vendors.
If Apple wins the Australian case at the end of the main proceeding, all Android-based products will effectively be shut out of the Australian market forever, unless Google or its device maker partners settle with Apple.
Why should a $136 million corporate purchase mean more to the world than the latest and greatest phone, the first Apple product to be introduced in the post-Jobs era? Because Red Hat has just stuck a fork in the biggest obstacle to mass use of the cloud, the cost of data storage.
As Glusters CEO Ben Golub explained it to me in an interview after the announcement “Customer data storage needs are growing 40-50% per year, but the cost of proprietary data storage clusters are dropping only 15% per year. Meanwhile, at Fry's, the cost of a 1 terabyte drive is down 90%.”
Having used Google's Android to become a solid second-place player in mobile devices, Samsung is hedging its bets.
Even its open source bets.
The first hedge is an IP deal with Microsoft covering Android, which Samsung previously licensed from Google.
Terms are not disclosed, so while many open source analysts are angry, like Brian Proffitt, it was hard for me to see exactly what they were angry about.
“Samsung screws Linux over,” Proffitt wrote after reading about the deal at ZDNet. When I pointed out the lack of disclosure, and the possibility this may be little money for nothing in the way of real protection, he returned my Tweet. “The Microsoft FUD that's sure to come will make great hay out of this. Actual dollar amount does not matter.”
I've been in Garden Grove this week, on the Disneyland side of town, taking in the annual West Coast Symposium of a company you probably never heard of, Liferay Inc.
Liferay is one of a host of little open source outfits that opened at the start of the last decade. But it never took the VC money, never moved from where it started. It just stuck to its knitting, which it calls “web portals.”
A portal is a general purpose Web site that could be anything. It could be Internet, could be Intranet. It could be a store, or it could be a community, as with Drupal or WordPress. It could be a lot of things, which is why the term Liferay gives to its software is obsolete.
Liferay, the company, is a collection of people who truly believe in open source, as a principle, as well as the software they write. What started out running small sites for non-profits that could not afford to run sites otherwise has grown into a community of 400,000 users, and an “open core” model of enterprise and community software run by everything from moms-and-pops to Hershey's and Merck.
In all the hoop-dee-doo about whether the PC is dead, or the nature of the tablet market, a very important point is being missed.
PCs, tablets, e-book readers, phones – no consumer electronic product is “made” any more. It's designed, it's ordered, it's distributed, it's exploited. Made? Not so much.
This dawned on me with news that Amazon expects to sell 3-5 million Amazon-branded tablets this year. The company hasn't even announced a product yet, but Forrester Research says they expect a hit because of Amazon's ability to exploit such a device through its cloud infrastructure.
Back in the 20th century (and you can write that without irony now, just as someone at the dawn of WWI could write “back in the 19th century” without irony) you needed a factory to build computers. At least an assembly plant. The names on your PC corresponded to the company building the device.
A year ago, at ZDNet, I was railing against Google crapware.
The Samsung “Android” phone I'd gotten from my AT&T store was filled with crapware – programs placed there by AT&T and Samsung. Some seemed to want me to pay for things I knew the phone could do for free. And I couldn't get rid of them. Still can't.
This is hurting Google's brand, I wrote. When people get an Android phone they expect that Google is standing somewhere behind it. Even if they got it from a carrier, no matter whose brand name is on it, there are brand expectations here the phone's not meeting. What I found on reading other blogs and investigating things further was that, not only was this the case, but there seemed to be little the company could do about it.
Turned out there was.
Over the last year Google has steadily taken more-and-more control over Android. They updated my software, in the background, and it's better. They imposed new conditions on OEMs and stopped talking so much about the Open Handset Alliance in favor of the Android brand. Now the main differences I note between my phone and my daughter's iPhone are that my GPS is an energy hog, and her music integrates well with her phone.
The news peg here is Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility, the shank half of the Motorola ham, for $10.5 billion, which includes a $2.5 billion “breakup fee,” money that will go to Motorola if for any reason the deal isn't consummated.
Much of the early talk about the deal was it was about patents. Motorola has thousands of patents. But as Florian Mueller notes at his excellent blog FossPatents, Motorola is in court against Microsoft, Apple and many trolls over other patents, and Motorola's court cases are not going well.
No, this is about control. By having a real Google phone, designed by Motorola and produced under Google's direction, in the marketplace, Google sets a bar for every other Android phone maker (think Samsung and HTC). By having its own name and design out in the market, and its own name on Motorola's lawsuits, Google can also face the legal difficulties of its OEMs squarely, like the sibling whose kid brother is getting beat up and finally comes outside.
“You want a piece of me? You want a piece of The Goog? Well here I am, come and get me.”
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