Value Of Open Source

There is a good article on Reuters where Monty Widenius talks about Oracle and MySQL. There is a quote that caught my attention:

Widenius said that while the code could be easily copied, the main problem was the ecosystem around MySQL — companies making business from it, developing it and using it. “If it would be easy to fork (copy) it, no-one would have paid a billion dollars for it.”

It isn’t a revolutionary concept. However, it illustrates the point that the real value of Open Source projects is not the code, but the community and ecosystem around the project. Growing the community and eco-system should be the primary function of a company that “owns” an open source project, since that is where the long-term value is. This in turn drives adoption and revenues.

No MySQL Spinoff

Computerworld is reporting that Larry Ellison and Oracle won’t spin-off MySQL.

“No, we’re not going to spin it off,” even if asked to by the EU, Ellison said. The EU is concerned about Oracle simultaneously owning MySQL, the leading open source database, and its own Oracle enterprise commercial database.

What I found to be even more interesting is the way he is dismissing Cloud Computing. In a time where many companies are embracing the cloud, and management thereof, Ellison is focused on the basics – databases, operating systems and hardware.

“Cloud computing is not only the future of computing, it’s the present, and the entire past of computing is all cloud,” he said. The cloud still requires components such as databases, operating systems, and memory, said Ellison. He pointed out the seeming absurdity in which cloud computing previously was called the Internet, software as a service, and on-demand computing.

He seems to be embracing almost all aspects of the Sun acquisition, including flash storage.