How open source licensing’s decisions are taken depend on legal issues, business strategies and costs structure.
IP lawyers as well as specialized firms are probably happy to help with the first ones, but let’s talk about the implications in the area of Value Configuration and Key activities looking at some real cases (Day Software, MySQL).
On the 3rd of September the European Commission has decided to conduct a phase two inquiry, which includes forwarding surveys to Oracle’s competitors and customers as well as organizing “crowded“ private hearings.
While lobbyists of both sides are arguing to convince the EC that the deal may – or may not – limit competition in the database market, Monty Widenius asks hecklers for help to save mySQL, and Oracle makes commitments.
Florian Mueller - known EU campaigner and strategist, involved also in the software patents war – shared with me some of his current ideas, and I took the chance to speculate around the events.
Setting up a non profit foundation may be an elegant solution to the problem. I think Sun should have enough experience dealing with communities (Java Community Process, for example). I believe that the non profit foundation would help also OpenOffice.org
Oracle or Sun maybe or maybe not interested in takin part in the MySQL foundation, it could be named FreeSQL or something like that to avoid all IP issues in case. I believe a relative high number of vendors could have an interest to support it.
OOo is different, very few players could be really interested and all in all the EU didn’t mention the office suite and without any pressure I can hardly imagine any change at Sun or Oracle.
So Monty sells MySQL to SUN and then wants it back for free when SUN is overtaken by Oracle. I find that a bit creative use of antitrust law for such objectives. The more critical technology of the merger is probably Java.
I am sure Monty could sell certification/support instead of licenses, regardless of the software “code” license. Florian’s relicensing request put the stakes a bit high.
Apparently Monty has been taken pretty seriously from the EU, and he is definitely one of the most important voices taking part into this antitrust investigation. So said, I believe that Monty’s concerns about the viability of his business approach shouldn’t be relevant in this case, though. What matters to me is code production sustainability, and nothing else.
Black Duck Software, the intellectual property management firm headquartered near Boston with offices in San Francisco, Frankfurt, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong – announced the release of the Black Duck Suite, a unified framework bringing together three Black Duck products (Black Duck Code Center, Export and Protex).
Black Duck ‘s survey conducted among software developers gathered at the SD West Conference held this week in Santa Clara (California), revealed little awareness about compliance, security and management problems. Actually those issues are addressed by Black Duck products and services, and I asked Tim Yeaton, one of the new CEO met at the open source think tank last week, to tell how he sees the market changing and how Black Duck strategy fits in the big picture.
MÃ¥rten Gustaf Mickos – formerly MySQL CEO and now open source strategist at Sun until the end of Sun’s fiiscal 3rd quarter 2009 – and Ulf Michael Videnius (aka Monty) – MySQL co-founder and CTO, now driving the development of Maria, the new storage engine Maria – both quit Sun Microsystems.
Roberto Galoppini, 
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