Is Oracle Starting a New Trend to Kill Open Source Competition
I have been thinking about the different ways that Oracle and Microsoft have chosen to compete against the open source community and its many projects. Microsoft has obviously taken the heads on direct competition route with some “improper” monopolistic tendencies while Oracle seems to have chosen another strategy; just buy them up. Over the past few years Oracle has purchased some of the leading open source projects or companies that were directly competitive to their core products:
- Sleepycat
- MySQL
- OpenSolaris
- Java
A complete list of FOSS and Linux projects for Oracle is at https://oss.oracle.com/.
Last month Oracle announced the end of life for the OpenSolaris project (https://blogs.computerworld.com/16741/oracle_dumps_opensolaris) ending a successful project from Sun that was acquired in the Sun purchase. What I find interesting in this closure is how easy it was for Oracle to buy Sun (just costs lots of money) and then shut down a project. Of course, Open Solaris can continue to move forward with a new community and supporter but unless that supporter is a large corporation heavily interested in OpenSolaris it will be very difficult to keep the project alive. Thus, Oracle was able to take out an open source project and community with some cash. Seems a much easier way to compete than Microsoft’s choice. In fact, what would Linux be like today if Microsoft had purchased Red Hat early on in an effort to slowly block their Linux growth?
As an open source enthusiast, I don’t see a lot of discussion about this new tactic from Oracle and how the open source community should respond. After all, once large corporations see how easy this was, what will stop them from going on a shopping spree and buying their competitors. I expect to see many people argue that new communities will just spring up and take on the corporations but I believe this is not that easy as there will be a large amount of disappointment in the community from members who contribute only to see their efforts thwarted.
What are your thoughts? What should the open source community be doing to counter this trend? Looking forward to your thoughts.
Finally, on a personal note. I am leaving the Xen.org community this Friday to start work on a new open source project and will be skipping my weekly post next week as I start the transition to a new job in a new city.
