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MySQL Acquisition, Sun and The Realities of Business
On Friday, I wrote about my initial thoughts on the whole Sun/MySQL acquisition thing. I did receive some good email on this, and some not-so-printable emails. I kind of expected that, but I do think the point was lost a bit in the translation. First, a couple of responses.
Perhaps the most common response was that Sun was making a really smart purchase. That they would be able to transform this $1B purchase into enterprise access, new markets, new clients and would be able to leverage this into new business for Sun at these customers, while also bringing the database to existing Sun customers. OK. I do get that – and we’ve seen it in other examples with RedHat. As a couple of writers indicated, we’ll have to wait and see on the success of this aspect.
The second most common response was that I was mixing up "Public Domain" and "Open Source." Yep. I was co-mingling them, but partly on purpose, but partly because I think the business models both have the same issues when it comes to getting real. NOTE: I said business models getting real, NOT the products.
Really, this was my point. I am really curious what you think about these types of "projects" or packages looking to make the jump to mainstream, profitable business. I’ve seen issues with companies playing on the "open source/free software" and "public domain/free software" (separately and together) thing only to use it as justification for charging more for their support services. Isn’t this just moving the shells around on the table? Instead of charging a license fee, they charge a support fee… that can be just as much. This trips me up as really a big challenge for these types of approaches because companies that don’t do full due diligence on software, make the jump to whatever package, then get surprised by the fees… well, they’re not going to be saying nice things about the product, that’s for sure.
How do these products and teams, that claim their software is openly and freely usable and/or available, look themselves in the mirror when they make those comparisons to "commercial" software, claiming they’re cheaper? Why not just be up front about the charges, stop pretending and get competing, in the commercial space, with all cards on the table?
That was really what I was trying to ask and try to understand.
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