It's interesting really. Thinking back 20 years, nobody would have expected or dreamed of a having a production level database be open source. It stared I think mainly with MySQL but it was really part of a greater shift. Compilers, OS-es, other tools and most software was closed source, by default. Shareware was a thing but it wasn't open source usually.
To that effect I mostly credit the GNU licensing model. I know people love to hate it and praise BSD/Apache/MIT licensing but I believe without GNU, the proliferation would not have happened.
But back to the point, it is interesting that the expectation is reversed completely - people expect databases to be open source by default. Having said that, I still support author's decision to keep it closed source, it's their work and they intend to monetize it in a particular way. It's been around for years, presumably it works for them, which is great.
http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft... seems pretty prescient given the glut of open source we find ourselves enjoying today. I do agree a lot of it can be credited to the GNU model, that is aligning on values over other things, but once more and more companies started understanding the economics that was immensely helpful too.
That's a good post from Brian, can't believe I haven't see it yet. Thanks for sharing.
> seems pretty prescient given the glut of open source we find ourselves enjoying today.
Indeed, even regarding databases:
[from blog post] > Yes, there have been traditional demand-side efforts like MySQL and research efforts like PostgreSQL, but neither of these “good enough” efforts has actually been good enough to compete with Informix, Oracle,
Look at PostgreSQL today -- it's got a variety of indexing options, scalability improvements and various other things. It hasn't displaced Oracle but it's certainly not a research effort anymore.
To that effect I mostly credit the GNU licensing model. I know people love to hate it and praise BSD/Apache/MIT licensing but I believe without GNU, the proliferation would not have happened.
But back to the point, it is interesting that the expectation is reversed completely - people expect databases to be open source by default. Having said that, I still support author's decision to keep it closed source, it's their work and they intend to monetize it in a particular way. It's been around for years, presumably it works for them, which is great.