451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
451 CAOS Links 2009.10.13
Matthew Aslett, October 13, 2009 @ 10:54 am ETLarry Ellison promises funds for MySQL, commits to community. The “open source vendor” debate in a nutshell. And more.
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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”
# Larry Ellison promised MySQL will receive more money for development and research, while Oracle maintained that it is committed to Java and open source developer communities.
# GroundWork raised $5m series D funding from Canaan Partners, Mayfield, JAFCO Ventures and SAP Ventures.
# InformationWeek reported that Motorola has vacated its seat on the LiMo Foundation board and will focus on Android.
# EnterpriseDB updated its Postgres Plus Standard Server open source database to version 8.4.
# Eric Raymond doesn’t like existing forges, and offered some advice on how not to solve them.
# Sandro Groganz argued that the longer someone uses FOSS, the more important the “freedom” aspects become.
# Matt Asay asked Is it Postgres’ time to shine?
# Sun announced the release of GlassFish Communications Server 2.0, designed for telecoms service delivery platforms.
# JitterBit released version 3.0 of its commercially licensed Enterprise MX edition.
The “open source vendor” debate in a nutshell
This week John Mark Walker asked for companies to be more transparent about where they fall on the openness spectrum. Evidence for why this is important came from Seth Grimes, who argued that you have to understand code words to decipher Pentaho’s commercial open source strategy, prompting James Dixon to argue that Pentaho is no less an open source vendor now that it is offering ClearView under a proprietary license than it was before it licensed the ClearView IP.
Simon Phipps argued that the problem Seth identifies is symptomatic of the fact that it has an open core licensing model. However, what Seth points out is that Pentaho is using the term “open source” liberally to apply to both open source and proprietary code. That is not actually an issue of the licensing model, but a related issue of branding and communication. If Pentaho were more explicit in its explanation, as John Mark Walker advises, the the problem Seth identifies diminishes. As I previously argued, being absolutely transparent about licensing is one of the key strategies that could be used to ensure a sustainable implementation of the Open Core model.
However, Pedro Alves does highlight one of the problems open core creates from a user’s perspective, again using Pentaho as an example. Meanwhile Sander Marechal argued that Open Core offers the worst of both worlds.
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The OS vendors debate around OS business models and how to make money form OS is a tremendous one. In Paris, at Open World Forum, many people was wondering how to reach it. Thanks to the open core model, as Seth seems to say, many times open source is a “window dressing” to sell proprietary solutions. I’m working with a different model, Free Software at Industrial Model, LGPL based. I mean: one single stable version where the project road-map is focused on the users’ needs, not on the marketing product’s needs. SpagoBI http://www.spagobi.org is following this model. I name this model “ecology of value” because it could build a real ecosystem with many different businesses inside, granting a sustainability in time because the benefits are not only for the company managing the solution, but for other users, integrators, vendors and researchers in a open network. It’s starting to work in some cases, but it’s not the most appealing model in the market because usually people prefer a very commercial solution they must buy or resell with a clear price list (instead of buying only the support if they like to do it). Am I crazy, or the ecology of value model cannot work in this old economy? Do we need to redirect not only technological innovation but also business imagination? I don’t have an answer, but open source is the place of richness, not of scanty resources, also in business model, luckily.