Open Source: Commercialization of Open Source

Companies like MySQL, RedHat, and SugarCRM have shown that successful business models can be built around Open Source.  Their success has convinced other companies like Sun, IBM, and even Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft to participate in the Open Source model. 

While corporate participation is not always in the spirit of the original intent of Open Source, often a strong corporate supporter of an Open Source project can drive acceptance and success for the project.  Adobe and others have recently found that while Open Sourcing software components and specifications usually means less control over the product direction and proprietary advantage lost to competitors, that loss may actually be small relative to revenues gained when a product gains overwhelming mind-share over its rivals.

MySQL is a good example of the success possible of growing an Open Source product commercially.  The corporate infrastructure and support from MySQL AB built up around their Open Source database has been an important factor in their success.  Now IBM is providing further commercial credibility to the MySQL database.

The IBM System i mid-range servers will be bundled with MySQL databases that use IBM’s DB2 as a certified storage engine.  MySQL has a module architecture that makes it possible to swap out and interchange storage engines used by the database.

Many applications are being written to provide support for MySQL.  This announcement means that those applications will be able to run as-is but customers will continue to be able to store their information within DB2.   The approach also allows existing DB2 data to be exposed via the MySQL interface.

In the commercial database market, DB2 competes with Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.  This deal with MySQL may broaden the use of DB2.  And from the MySQL perspective, being pre-installed on the popular line of IBM machines provides greater recognition and acceptance from enterprises.

The original authors of the GPL may not have envisioned some of the twists and turns that Open Source has gone over the last decade.  Commercial Open Source sounds like an oxymoron, but the marriage of Open Source with a solid commercial supporter is becoming a combination that’s very hard to beat.