Open Source - and Commercial?

Open Source does not => Free ride.  

I get that.

Most open source projects that we use in our enterprise are complex, rapidly evolving bundles of software. Downloading them and playing around a little is easy and free, but when you begin to talk about serious development, test and production deployment to support mission critical needs, the dynamics change completely. In these cases, an organization can either go out and hire a large group of really smart engineers who can keep on top of the open source software, or can hire a smaller crew in house and outsource the job of open source support to commercial open source shops, that will often sell support subscriptions at a reasonable cost. (Redhat for Linuxand FuseSource for Apache SOA products are familiar examples)

These companies in turn go out and hire some of the brightest and best open source gurus who designed and wrote the stuff in the first place. Great minds need to put bread on their table too. Or as James Strachan, the brilliant founding member of Apache Camel and ActiveMQ said in a recent conference – “we need money for our beers too, you know”. Of course you do. And nobody should grudge these dedicated open source engineers a dime of what they earn.

That’s not the problem with Commercial Open Source.  So what is the problem?

In “The Failure of Commercial Open Source Software” - Rachael King  of Bloomberg Business Week asserts that open source can be successful only “when it’s supported by a broad community of developers, not just one company trying to extract revenue.”

Bingo!

This has been going on since open source first became reality. As the article points out, the seemingly unending cycle of brilliant open source projects being cornered by commercial companies, with profit as its primary driver, has been repeating with almost every major open source project.

It’s a familiar pattern .  Companies looking for venture capital or profit will jump on the next hot open source project to come along, hire all its committers, make noises for a few months (or years, depending on the size and relative level of integrity) about how committed they are to open source, realize they want to make more money to satisfy their ever hungry venture capitalists or stock holders, and eventually end up killing the open source goose that’s been faithfully laying the golden eggs. Sometimes, it’s the founders and lead engineers of the open source projects that go out and start these companies but it’s the same volition – and has the same end result. The death of the open source project.

Lather, Rinse,  Repeat – for a decade or two. And here we are today, seeing the same pattern in the Hadoop and Cassandra world.

But all hope is not lost. The free market and common sense do amazingly prevail.

In “Battle on: MapR, Cloudera pimp their Hadoop products” -  Derrick Harris points out that while only as recently as 8 months ago,  the mighty Apache Hadoop  platform was monopolized by a single company (CloudEra) – today there are four companies in fierce competition to outdo each other on Hadoop offerings.

For me, the average Joe Open Source Power user - this is really awesome. It’s a healthy trend and gives me hope that Hadoop – the open source essence of it – will continue to flourish and thrive in coming years, no matter what folly one or the other of these commercial companies might end up falling prey to.

It’s only a matter of time that we should begin to see this happening with Cassandra. It appears today that Datastax has a monopoly on the Apache Cassandra project (just Google for Apache Cassandra and you’ll probably find Datastax occupying most of the first 10 search result pages!). If Apache Cassandra is going to survive, thrive and flourish,  which I sure hope will be the case, other capable companies will have to emerge in this space, to help take Cassandra to the next level and to make it a long term viable NOSQL database for all of us. And I’m confident this will be the case.

Let me be clear. As I said at the outset – I have nothing against CloudEra, Datastax or any other commercial vendor trying to re-distribute open source or make money of it. This is in fact, an essential element for the success of open source and we welcome and need your expertise and innovation. And I certainly have nothing but the deepest respect and gratitude for the multitude of committed open source engineers who work long hours to create this amazing products, and who may today work in the ranks of such companies to make an honest living – all the power to you.

All we ask is of commercial companies reselling open source is – don’t try to corner and monopolize any open source project -  Apache Hadoop, Cassandra or other wise. Keep the project  open, healthy and growing! Don’t kill the goose that’s laying the golden eggs – for your sake – and for all of ours!

OK – I’ll get off my rant now J Back to more hands on Cassandra and Hadoop in my next post.