Listen, and you can almost hear the fan-bois screaming,
“OMG! Oracle PWNED RedHat!”

And the analysts are chanting, Oracle is going to eat RedHat’s lunch!

Yuh huh. Let’s quit deluding ourselves. It was only a matter of time before this happened to some Open Source company that based their products on GPL.

So you’ve got RedHat, that puts all this work into building a solid, simple to manage, enterprise-class Linux distribution, and now one of their “partners”, another ISV looking for higher profits, and a bigger slice of the ‘market pie’, is going to abide fully by the GPL, take the work that RedHat (their once partner) has been doing on Linux and had to publish, and support another distribution of their own.

This is not underhanded. This is exactly what I expected to happen long ago. You see, Oracle may look a bit dirty here, but they’re totally playing by the rules. They partnered with RedHat and got them to swallow the early development and market penetration. They basically used RedHat as a shell company they could shallowly and speculatively invest in to eat the high-risk phase of Linux development. That period where uptake is questionable, performance is lagging, and mind-share is lower than entrenched platforms. Once Linux started to eat everyone else’s lunch on the server and was a proven performer in the marketplace, the seriously high-risk portion of the game is over. Congratulations Linux, you’re a commodity.

And commodities that are developed in a near communist fashion, that require or enforce the notion that ‘if you add code to me, you have to give it back to everyone’ don’t stay proprietary products or commodities sold by one outlet for very long.

Fictional corollary:
Say GM had a top-selling car like the Chevrolet Malibu, and Ford is having a hard time flogging Contour’s to the public. But the Malibu was developed under a GPL license, so Chevrolet has to give away all technical drawings, part specifications, and assembly instructions. What’s Ford going to do? Right. They’ll copy the Malibu — bolt for bolt, make a few changes to the assembly process, save a few hundred million on the development cost (after all the design is done), and churn out a high volume of the exact same product (with a few additions that they might make) at a lower overall cost than Chevy. After all, Ford doesn’t have to try and recoup the development costs, they just have to cover their production and retooling. Way cheaper.

But if you release the source modifications, if you abide by the GPL, then you’re fully aware that this risk exists. You can’t possibly tell me no one at RedHat over the last few years hasn’t thought, “Hey what if a big company with lots of capital, resources, and an existing support structure takes our codebase that we have to release to the public in order to even have the product that we sell services for, and sells services based around it even cheaper than we do?”

This is the only good part of the GPL. It makes people realize how stupid they were for basing a business model around what is effectively social communism. It makes you give away the keys to the city, so if you do rise up to the top of the heap, you get screwed as soon as you’re a commodity. Development costs will out-pace support costs as competition from outsiders with lower development costs (thanks to your hard work having to be published and open for the world to see) erodes profit margins.

How did people not see this coming? Seriously?

So my message to all the GPL nut jobs out there running around like cocker spaniel puppies with no bladder control is: DEE DEE DEE!.

And in case your panties are still in a wad, there’s a business, ownership, competition friendly solution, and it gives people true freedom.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 9:32 am and is filed under Core Dump, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.