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Examples of movement in the commercial/open source box model

« H E linux :: open source :: email
posted 2005.12.20 Tue
Just saw this post about xGL development closing up. My thought from that post was Novell thinks in house development is better or they don't want to collaborate with others (who are interested in xgl, ie users/developers from redhat, debian, gentoo, ubuntu, ...). So I thought I'd put my box back up here and populate it with the xgl instance as well as other examples.
I've put some examples of projects that appear to be going in the opposite direction. For those that are moving to open source, there appears to be commercial activity building on top of them (the curvy line). (Though I'm not sure that the curvy line actually goes to the right, it might go back to the left depending on a few factors). I'd love to hear comments or feedback...

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comments (2)


1. Matt Asay left...
2005.12.22 Thu 12:16 pm

I'm not sure I agree with some of the characterizations (though I like the idea behind the exercise). For example, it's not the case that EnterpriseDB has a closed version of PostgreSQL (unless I'm much mistaken). Rather, they have extended PostgreSQL with some closed extensions. They would therefore look like the "curvy" line you refer to for Mozilla/etc.

I'm also not sure that the "open/closed" binary is useful. Some of Alfresco's software, for example, is closed-source, but still more open than much of the pureplay open source web content management stuff out there...because we have an open standards, highly pluggable architecture. So, we have partners who work with us and with pureplay open source companies and find us much more "open" to work with than the open source projects.

Matt


2. Matt left...
2005.12.22 Thu 4:28 pm

Matt (Asay)- Thanks for your comments.

WRT EnterpriseDB, I beg to differ. Does EnterpriseDB ship source or is it available? If not, they are not open source (even if they are built on top of open source software). MS has bits of open source code in their operating system. Are they Open Source?

Regarding Open/Closed. If "Open Source" is just hype, then the dichotomy is useless. I guess you could change the meaning of "Open Source" to vendor neutral/standards compliance (which I alluded to in the arrows of my previous post). I'm more than willing to admit that a well documented though closed api, might be much easier to use than undocumented open source (ignoring the standards question altogether). I'll be pragmatic and allow that being "Open Source" alone is not enough.