Has open source lost its halo?

Are some companies disguising self-serving business practices with open source strategies

By Eric Lai, Computerworld, 02/16/07

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Is open source still a grassroots social movement made up of idealistic underdogs trying to revolutionize an amoral industry? Or has it become a cloak used by IT vendors large and small to disguise ruthless and self-serving behavior?

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Some observers argue it's the latter. Despite occasional protests from old-timers—the heated backlash against the Microsoft-Novell détente, for example—open source has become so co-opted by mainstream IT, so transformed by "accidental open sourcers" simply looking for a better business model, that it's lost its cherished moral edge.

"Open source has become a free pass for all sorts of competitive actions that would once have been—at a minimum—roundly criticized," wrote Gordon Haff, an analyst at Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata in an online piece last month.

Haff cites IBM's release of its VisualAge software development tools to the open source Eclipse Foundation in 2001, a move he argues has dealt near-fatal blows to commercial IDEs such as Borland's JBuilder and Symantec's Café.

IBM also released its lightweight Cloudscape database in 2004 to the open source Apache Foundation, where it is now known as Derby. Like Eclipse, Derby helps draw companies to Java, where IBM makes a tidy sum—even more than Sun Microsystems—hawking middleware and related tools, Haff said.

But open-sourcing Cloudscape also hurt sales at companies such as Sybase, which made mobile databases the centerpiece of its "unwired enterprise" strategy, as well as open source vendors like SleepyCat Software (now owned by Oracle) and MySQL, Haff said.

"Some collateral damage to competitors in the process is not something that IBM likely regrets," Haff wrote.

Sybase's chief marketing officer, Raj Nathan, insists the company is doing fine and that its offering remains "superior to any of our competitor's offerings, including Cloudscape."

But saddled with disappointing growth in its mobile and embedded database business, Sybase is turning its attention to other areas, such as data integration, to boost revenue growth.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.

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