Funded Open Source Companies Part Two
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.
No one has a problem with open source developers making money. On the other hand, many people have an issue when the original open source expectations change for the worse, especially for a cornerstone framework like Spring. I really doubt the major developers from controversial open source companies like SpringSource ever had any problem putting food on the table, yet they want more at the expense of the users that helped build their success. Without JBoss, Red Hat, and SpringSource, other comparable open source projects (GlassFish, Ubuntu, and Guice) would have taken their place without the creeping restrictions that these companies added. No company is irreplaceable.
The companies’ actions are legal, but these companies should not turn around and complain about how ungrateful or useless their users are. A good company recognizes that if users complain, it usually means that they still care at some level. Most users that decide to dump your product or service outright will probably not bother commenting, and you will not have a chance to get them back.
Open source purists generally prefer GPL and LGPL from FSF, and they would fully applaud moves toward GPL, dual licensing, and additional restrictions. Business-oriented developers prefer Apache/BSD/MIT and tend to avoid GPL like the plague, which is why they flocked to Spring before the latest announcement. Open source purists care the most about free as in freedom (except for the users,) while the business developers generally care more about free as in beer (i.e., the bottom line.)
I personally do not care too much about free as in freedom for open source, but usually without this part, the product eventually loses the free as in beer status since it has no forking risk. Free as in beer is also very important to help an open source community grow and thus increase marketability for product knowledge, since most users are unwilling or unable to pay. The reason most business developers chose Spring is probably not as a political statement, but simply that it is much cheaper to deploy Spring on Tomcat or Jetty as compared to paying for WebSphere or WebLogic.
I believe no one would complain about JBoss, Red Hat, or SpringSource if they started their projects with the restrictions that they have now from the start. Would they have been as successful? My guess is not even close. Given how intelligent the heads of these companies apparently are or were, I find it hard to believe that they did not anticipate possibly adding restrictions later on. As stated before, if they had any concerns about monetizing open source, they should have released their products as proprietary from the beginning.
SpringSource would not have needed venture funding had they stopped trying to be everything to everyone. They were good at providing a dependency injection container and integrating with various third-party libraries. They lost that focus, added many not-invented-here libraries, and are now trying to make their unsuspecting captive audience pay. Excellent business-friendly and sometimes innovative open source software from Apache, Codehaus, Google Code, Eclipse, and OpenBSD have been around for years, and many developers make a good living consulting for those projects without any problem or unpleasant changes. Perhaps the problem is forming an unsustainably large company around open source in the first place, but IBM seems to be doing quite well.
The announcement is not too bad this time, and SpringSource will get away with it. This will encourage further restrictions in the future if other companies like MySQL are any indication. Eventually, Spring users may realize that the vendor has locked them in, which is precisely what they wanted to avoid by using business-friendly open source software. Since the same venture fund is behind G2One, this scenario might happen to Groovy and Grails users as well.