Open Season On Open Source?

conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece looking at the possible future of open source. The article's conclusion is that it might be grim. From the piece: 'Software giant Oracle Corp. has acquired two small open-source companies and is in negotiations to buy at least one more. Many experts believe this is the beginning of a broader trend in which established tech companies scoop up promising open-source startups. While the validation is thrilling it's also unsettling. Many young idealists who set out to create an alternative to the tech Establishment now find themselves becoming part of it.'"

N3P is the future

[network23]

From n3p.se [n3p.se]:

N3P offers a two-year college level training in how to become a successful Project Entrepreneur in Open Source or Project Entrepreneur in Omni Communications. Our students will learn not only the technical possibilities, but also how to exploit new business opportunities, manage profitable ideas, and create flourishing businesses.

Each year, N3P admits 80 students-20 at our classrooms in Stockholm City, 20 through a system of advanced distance learning and 40 at our new classrooms in Malmö/Copenhagen. There will be two new classes each year 2006-2008, with the possibility to expand the concept into other regions and markets.

The typical student is between 20 and 30 years old, driven by one of three motivations; 1) the desire for prosperity, 2) independency or 3) to radically innovate. N3P will carefully screen the applicants for doers, not talkers, while persistence, passion and the ever so important ability to sell, are other important criteria.

The training in Stockholm will focus on how to generate business using open source. The training in Malmö/Copenhagen will focus on how to generate business with Omni Communication.

The future will show a great demand for individuals that have the ability to implement necessary changes. They should be entrepreneurs, fluent in new technology, project management and marketing. They also should excel in sales and development of new products and businesses. N3P identifies them as "Project Entreprenerus".

Most of our students will form their own business before graduating, and it is our expectation that many will be very successful.

More interesting stuff at http://n3p.se/en.php [n3p.se].

Students even get free iBooks (the school is run by BSD people), a domain of their own, web space and are encouraged to start doing business immediately.

According to the school, there is an shortage of project managers that knows open source but also how to make business. By releasing 40-80 new project entrepreneurs fluent in open source each year, this will result in a huge push for open source in Scandinavia.

So to summarize the situation .....

[nblender]

So first you write some 'bitchin' code, license it so anyone can use it, even in a commercial product. Then when it gets popular, you decide to make some money off of it by offering consulting services. Then you become successful so someone bit wants to buy you.

Now you're complaining? Millions of poets, the world over, would kill prose for such an opportunity.

Making money from open source

[murdocj]

Folks on slashdot are always talking about how it's possible to make money on free/open source software, and that F/OSS is the wave of the future. Well, if you *really* believe this, why are you shocked that large companies agree with you? Or that people who start open source projects agree with you?

My guess is that a lot of the people who talk about making money off of F/OSS don't really believe it in their gut. They really believe that F/OSS is always going to be a volunteer activity, not a business model.

Desperation on behalf of acquirers

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies like Oracle are seriously threatened in the long term by open source software. I would see such acquisitions more as sensible business on behalf of a company like Oracle. As their traditional business model is threatened, if I was a shareholder, I would want to see some attempt to build alternative revenue streams through growth in to new areas. Oracle must find work in selling consulancy services. Revenue from pure software sales will not last for ever.
Buying a company that develops an open source product to kill it will not work. It takes only the slightest problem over violation of an open source license agreement to kill a version with an unsuitable license. Look at what happened to XFree86. Nearly overnight, all the developers moved to X.org.

Well they would say that, wouldn't they

[FishandChips]

There's nothing new in this. Big business is always trying to beat down the small guy by saying that "You won't succeed without our money and expertise. Give up now and sell to us or you are doomed." Open source is just the latest arena to get the treatment. Sometimes true, but often corporate bureaucrats prove far less adept at running a concern than the small guy who's become tough and shrewd because he's had to live by his wits with sod-all in the bank. Corporate bureaucrats are very good at overpaying, though, and you can hardly blame anyone for taking a fabulously absurd sum if it's on offer.

As for Mr Ellison, he can't have it both ways. In the interview on which this article is based, he first paid homage to open source which these days is about as controversial as calling for fresh air and clean drinking water. He then affected to find Mysql to be so small as to be beneath his radar but curiously knew all about it. That Ellison should find a company a tiny percentage of Oracle's size such a thorn says more about his tender ego than anything else. There's absolutely no guarantee that Oracle's "aggressive" buying spree will do it any good. The moment they think they've plucked out one thorn, another will appear in its place.

Self-delusion

[ewe2]

They don't know what they're buying. They think if they buy an open-source company they're getting "open-source". They don't get a free community unless they understand it. They dont get the product they think they're getting. Software companies have been trying to make their customers be unpaid beta testers for years and frequently they think this is a cheaper shortcut to that end. They waste the community's effort. This isn't just the case with FOSS, it's generally the case with most company acquisitions, it's just more obviously idiotic with FOSS.

Re:Self-delusion

[RLiegh]

They get the work of the free community; which is enough to stall them while they have to rebuild from scratch (lest they be sued for patent infringements, etc). So it's the next best thing.

"part of it"?

[the bluebrain]

How about "[...] Many young idealists who set out to create an alternative to the tech Establishment now find themselves successfully infiltrating it, and changing the landscape as we know it."
 
Software is becoming a commodity. The business is heading in the direction of services. Once Oracle has reached market saturation - everyone who is going to use Oracle, is - the only way they can grow is by selling people their knowledge on how best to use Oracle. And the fact that Oracle is dipping its toes in the sea of open source only goes to show that at some point, the commodity itself will retail at its actual cost of (re-)production: the cost of the bandwidth for downloading it.
 
/or so sayeth the idealist

Hold on a minute here...

[argoff]

Let me get this straight, people are spending big money to buy up open source companies left and right and because of that we should be concerned about the future of open source?????

How about an alternative view ..... once people figure out that they can make companies that are pratically guaranteed to get bought out at over valued prices or become profitable open-source ventures if they dont. And even better, chances are that 90% of the of the software they start their base off of is likely already developed. I wouldn't be supprised to see a nuclear explosion in the open source software industry bigger than the dot.com and the PC boom and the integtrated circuit boom combined.

Re:Why is this Unsettling

[johnjaydk]

The young idealists who let themselves be bought are the only ones affected. Everybody else can still fork if they have any kind of major problem. This is a non-issue.

Bull.

Two-three years ago the was a really great open source VoIP platform named VOCAL from a silicon valley startup named Vovida. Then they got bought by Cisco. Guess what. There is absolutely zero activity on the project now. Sure I could fork, but then I'd have to restart the entire development effort.

Open Source could kill offshoring

[Travoltus]

by killing the entire concept of a paid programmer altogether.

Theoretically speaking, that is.

If Firefox continues to improve in quality, it will become so superior to the likes of Opera and MSIE that it'll be the biggest and nearly only game in town. At some point, who wants to buy a browser when they can get the free and super secure Firefox version for, potentially, every platform? At some point MicroSoft falls so far behind with MSIE that they cannot afford to continue hiring programmers here or abroad to update it, and they may sell off or close down the MSIE line.

Now if Open Office improves similarly, MS Office could be endangered. Why buy MS Office if you can get an equal ROI for free with Open Office?

Perhaps Linux gets tons of hyper consumer grade (as in, your grandma could use it without breaking a sweat) facelifts, while holding onto its power user underpinnings. Easily done, actually. If all programs are written as procedures in shared object libraries, you could make both command line and graphical user front ends to call them, and a really crazy coder would give the user a 'command line equivalent' submenu option for the GUI version so the wanna-be power user could see how the command line version would have done the work. That would result in perfect scaleability. At some point, Linux catches up with Windows in Suzi Office Worker appeal, and its privacy, anti DRM, etc. advantages, drives Windows into irrelevancy. What's left of driver support problems are resolved, and whammo, MicroSoft finds itself losing sales at a catastrophic level.

Offshore and domestic coders of *any* app could theoretically be, despite their cheapness, be put out of work by a wetware beowulf cluster of hobbyist coders and volunteer testers tired of paying for any software, period, and who are hell bent upon matching the functionality of current for-pay software.

There are a number of factors holding back open source, though, not the least of which is Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, aka pro-Commercial Software Propaganda.

But if these barriers fall, open source could theoretically force many, many offshore and domestic software manufacturing companies to compete against FREE and BETTER software. This is very bad GNUs for their bottom line.

At that point the market weighs far more heavily toward providing services instead of selling software, and then a lot of that involves face to face work.

The math says that offshore outsourcing stands to lose a heaping mountain of money as Open Source moves further into maturity. Of course, domestic IT has already suffered; out of work domestic coders have great potential to inflict spiteful vengeance by producing a GPL'd product that provides the same functionality as the software being written by the people who took their jobs, and then convincing companies to go with the free product instead.

LOL, even if this post gets modded down, the cat is now officially out of the bag. :)

Re:Stereotype much?

[r_j_howell]

If they do understand it, it scares them. I once killed a job interview by noting that my last project had been going so well, that we had operatd for six months without a manager, and shipped ahead of schedule. The developer in the room nodded and smiled. But the Jr. V.P. got icy. She had been quite friendly up to that point. And I knew I had popped the ego of the person who was going to decide whether to hire me.

What is "open source" anyway?

[argent]

You mention Open Office and Firefox. The relationship between these products and "open source" is mixed at best.

Open Office isn't really an Open Source project, it's a commercial product that was open-sourced after it was Gatesed to death.

Mozilla/Firefox is an odd beast. Mosaic out as semi-open-source and benefitted from the same kind of feedback as real open source products. The relationship between Netscape and Mosaic and whether "Netscape Mosaic" shared more than a name with Mosaic aside, Netscape's product was at least a reimplementaion of Mosaic, and Mozilla/Firefox is yet another reimplementation, funded at first as an upgrade for Netscape using the power of the Open Source model... and the result isn't unequivocally good.

Meanwhile, Microsoft started out with the Mosaic code base to produce Internet Explorer.

The relationship between open source products and commercial ones is complex, but theer's damn few FOSS projects that have produced top notch products that appeal to people other than the software developer crowd that haven't a goodly portion of commercial development involved.