Open source licenses and its impact on commercialization

The choice of an open source license sparks a debate from time to time and this time around it is about using GPL as a strategic weapon to force your competitors to share their code versus use BSD to have faith in your proprietary solution as an open source derivative to reduce the barrier to an entry into the market. I agree with the success of mySQL but I won’t attribute the entire success to the chosen license. Comparing open source licenses in the context of commercializing a database is very narrow comparision. First of all PostgreSQL and mySQL are not identical databases and don’t have the exact same customers and secondly I see database as enabler to value add on top of it. EnterpriseDB is a great example of this value add and I think it is very speculative to say whether it is an acquisition target or not – the real question is would EnterpriseDB have accomplished the same if PostgreSQL used GPL instead of BSD.

I see plenty of opportunities in the open source software license innovation and over a period of time disruptive business models will force the licenses to align with what business really need. IP indemnification of GPL v3 is a classic example of how licenses evolve based on the commercial dynamics amongst organizations. We can expect the licenses to become even more complex with wide adoption of SaaS delivery models where a vendor is not shipping any software anymore.

People do believe in open source but may not necessarily believe the fact that they have a legal obligation to contribute back to the open source community every time they do something interesting with it and Richard Stallman would strongly disagree. The companies such as BlackDuck has a successful business model on the very fact that vendors don’t want to ship GPLed code. We should not fight the license, just be creative, embrace open source, and innovate!

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