So Explain This to Me Again

I realize I must be thick in the head, but...

  1. Thousands of developers across the globe "contribute" to MySQL to make it a reasonable RDBMS.
  2. MySQL AB maintains a shell company of 350 people to sell and license this freely-derived product to corporations for thousands of dollars.
  3. Sun acquires MySQL for ONE BILLION DOLLARS.  Contributing developers get... nothing.  A bunch of already rich people get more rich.

I must be totally off my rocker, because I see this as another sign of how "free" software hurts the developer community.  How can anyone stand by the Writers Guild while they fight for residual income (after they've already been paid once) and yet, in the same breath, say that not paying developers for their work makes sense.

I just don't get it.

Posted by MattL on Saturday, January 19, 2008 at 6:25 AM
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Categories:   IT
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January 22, 2008 12:22 PM

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Robbie
Robbie

If a software engineer wants to work for free or a company wants to give away an engineer's work product, unfortunately, there isn't a lot one can do about it. At the end of the day, software engineers need to pay the mortgage, feed the kids, etc, like everybody else. Fortunately, most people realize that as well.

Most successful open source projects are usually funded by large companies that use OSS to sell expensive consulting time, expensive enterprise support, or overpriced servers (see IBM, Red Hat, MySQL, Novell, Sun, etc). They use free software as a loss leader, to better compete with Microsoft's business model (selling software in higher volumes and lower cost that runs on commodity hardware).

The other model is to use OSS to power web services or devices (see Yahoo, Google), and keep the company's core I.P. proprietary because they aren't selling software, they are selling services. This kind of business model has led to GPL 2 vs GPL 3 divide you see in the OSS space, since this model doesn't violate GPL 2, but I thinks goes against it's spirit. (Shouldn't Google release the source code for it's search engine if it's using Linux, Apache, MySql, Java, etc)?

Despite the business model challenges OSS has, it does have it's good points. Microsoft recently released the weblogs.asp.net/.../...rce-code-now-available.aspx">source for the .net framework. It's not free (you still have to buy Windows), but I think the increased opacity of software platforms, will help engineers to better understand their tools and their limits. Also, many software engineers who were major contributors to OSS projects, used it as a spring board to better career opportunities and gained valuable industry recognition they may not have received otherwise.

Giving away software makes business sense, if you can make more money selling something else because of it.

Robbie

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