Open Source Hypocrisy

Matt Asay writes on his C|Net blog about a company contributing some code back to the open source community, and then being realistic and humble enough about their efforts to understand only a certain segment of the audience will even care about their contribution.

I say this with a smile on my face, as for once someone contributes something without thumping their chest and trying to make it look like the human race would falter and implode without their colossal efforts.

The open source project that benefits is PostgreSQL, and the most entertaining quote is this one, a comment to the original blog post by a user named elmulfuh:

“If anyone was borrowing and modifying code it would have been End Point Corporation. However, you made it perfectly clear that they developed a new solution, named after a mountain goat, to suit their needs. You should get to work on those open-source licenses that encourage sharing rather than just mooching off the ones that are already there.”

The software they contributed is called Bucardo, which was named after a rather hardy mountain goat. It is a multi-master replication solution that does provide a significant and unique set of features, as evidenced in Backcountry’s press release:

Backcountry.com has been battle-testing Bucardo in live production for nine months. Bucardo has already exceeded the specialty retailer’s expectations, seamlessly shepherding it through its highest traffic day yet of more than 2.35 million page views. That’s approximately 1,600 page views per minute, all managed by Bucardo. Good news since Backcountry.com anticipates traffic levels to surge to near three million page views per day this holiday season.
 
It is uncommon for a major online retailer to release its internal tools to open source, but as Bresee put it, “The open source community has basically been our sugar mama for years. We’re just stoked to give something back.”

John, I’m just as stoked as you are. Congratulations, and I hope your contributed code finds a great many people willing to help it along. Excellent!

We’ve written before on the suspicion that products and open source software don’t mix all that well.

TechCrunch writes an article titled How Grey Is Your Valley: Making Money From Open Source where they question the motives of Matt Mullenweg.

Matt owns a company, and also is a lead contributor to an open source project. The issue stated by TechCrunch is that the main product provided by Matt’s company depends on the open source project – or more importantly, the lack of a competitor provided in the open source project.

There are some loud protests at the accusations, one of which titled TechCrunch Questions Matt Mullenweg’s Ethics at OpenSourceCommunity.org.

I remember several core developers on some open source projects I once contributed to coming under fire with the same allegations. While I defended them at the time – as my own understanding of the logic made sense, as the things that were turned into products were not multi-purpose and had deployment requirements that just didn’t fit being default – I cannot really defend Matt’s predicament as spam filtering to me seems like an obviously stock thing that needs to be done.

On the flip side, Akismet is more than a product, it is a service, and providing that service carries a cost. How can such a service be provided for free?

It is my belief that anyone that plays a major role on an open source project cannot really profit from that effort, lest they have thick enough skin to tolerate the backlash of accusations and so on. This isn’t new, folks.

Ok, so MySQL.com moves their enterprise tarballs to the paid-only enterprise downloads section on the site, and makes a few other changes.

Pandemonium.

Now, is this reaction really justified, or just a whole lotta whooey? (Thanks Eben)

The Register’s Developer section has a good overview, and MySQL’s own Kaj Arnö explains on his own blog.

*spacemonkey pats himself on the back for remembering the HTML entity for that last letter in Kaj’s last name

Gavin Clarke hits the nail on the head in the Register article when he says:

“There is concern that restricted access to source will harm the quality of the final product while leaving the community straddled with a second-class database that slips out of touch with MySQL’s development cycles.”

This was the same concern many had with RedHat when they split RedHat Linux into Fedora and RedHat Enterprise. Personally, I couldn’t keep up with the pace of Fedora (seemed I needed to erase all my machines and start over every 6 months) so I switched all my servers to Debian. Problem solved. :-)

Maybe the better question here is this:

Can an open source project be solely sponsored by a corporate entity that’s sole means of income is based on that project?

Something tells me this is a lot harder balance to find than is commonly believed. In fact I suspect it’s just not really a combination that will work, like oil and water.

PostgreSQL is another FOSS database that instead of having only one corporate sponsor, has many. The biggest sponsors seem to have no commercial interest in the project, as they use the technology internally. Of course this seems to be a much more optimal scenario, but how can other FOSS projects find that balance? Or is corporate sponsorship just a bad idea for FOSS?

ComputerWorld in Australia reports that SugarCRM will switch from the Sugar Public License to GPLv3.

To be honest, I’m torn as to whether I see these things as advancements or setbacks – as sometimes a particular typo of software deserves special treatment from a license perspective. Maybe due to the purpose of the software, or how the software is used or distributed, but one-size-fits-all doesn’t really work here.

What I find most interesting is that most companies that release open source products use their own license (or a modified GPL or License of Guile), as the GPL doesn’t condone commercial third party development due to overzealous interpretation of derivative works.

SugarCRM is going to go the other way however, and it will be interesting to see if this was a good move or not.