LinuxWorld: Fear & Loathing in Linux World: Commoditization, Commercialization and the Customer

I caught Mårten Mickos's keynote yesterday at LinuxWorld, before a last run through the trade show floor and out.  He's always a trend setter.  First, it wasn't a 45 minute infomercial for MySQL AB, but rather a talk about how to think about an open source based business.  Second, he said some brilliant things.  Here's a smattering:

The first community that arrives in an open source project are those that are willing to spend time to save money.  The second community are those that are willing to spend money to save time. 

He observed that the license is a balancing point between your community and customers.  It isn't just finding the compelling reason to buy something, but you have to ensure you don't create a compelling reason for the community to abandon the project.   

You can protect your open source business with:

• copyrights
• trademarks
• trade secret
• superior service
• product stewardship

While he didn't think there were trade secrets in MySQL (i.e. the code base), I would ask the lawyers amongst us to let us know if his customer list, and things the MySQL engineering team knows won't work (what they left out of the code) don't constitute things still protected as trade secrets.

He observed that the open source world is helping standardize licenses.  Approximately 70% of the 88,000 projects on SourceForge.net use the GPL.  If you had 88,000 proprietary products, you would likely have 88,000 different EULA. 

A vendor associated with an open source project provides stewardship, and a road map. 
He finished up on the forward looking note that he believes (as so many of us do) that open source is not eating it's way up the stack to commoditize all value out of software, but rather only a small fraction of the world's software needs have been met so far.  A wonderful keynote. 

 

Comments

[Arjen Lentz]

> things the MySQL engineering team knows won't work

These are actually documented:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/open-bugs.html
So no secrets there.

You may be right about the customers. Generally, we don't mind people knowing who uses MySQL as it's good advertising! Some customers however don't want to disclose what tools they use, for their own strategic reasons. Financial institutions are typically among that group.

Regards, Arjen Lentz
Community Relations Manager, MySQL AB

[stephe]

Thanks for the comment, Arjen. I was a little unclear perhaps. When I said "things that don't work", I meant experiments that were abandoned as underperforming (for example) and perhaps never made it into main MySQL tree, rather than bugs. Although your example is absolutely correct -- I've had that discussion before at several places I've worked, where you just don't want to directly publish your bug lists. I think companies like MySQL finally give us data that while we may feel uncomfortable that our competitors might be looking at our bug lists and using them with their customers, customers themselves are more appreciative of the transparency because everyone knows software has bugs.

Also, while every company wants to trumpet the names of companies using your products, I was referring to the actual customer contact names and info, and as you point out, they may be hesitant to share their strategic uses.