Non-linux servers

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Mon, Dec 12, 2005 at 10:34:40AM -0500, Bill McGonigle wrote:
> A great counterexample is Bizgres - a version of PostgreSQL that can 
> distribute subqueries among a cluster of "cheap" machines and seems to 
> beat the pants off of Oracle RAC and similar products.  And they get 
> ~$80K for it.  But PostgreSQL has a BSD-ish license so they're not 
> giving back those enhancements therefore the open PostgreSQL community 
> is slowly reinventing that wheel.  By time they're done, Oracle will be 
> another step ahead.  If PostgreSQL was GPL'ed we'd have a FLOSS product 
> that could compete with Oracle today ...

I'm not sure who the "they" in this sentence is. My limited googling
points me to bizgres.org for the website, but that's not responding. But
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/bizgres/ seems to be an open source
project that claims to be a distribution of Postgres as you describe it.
Am I missing something or misunderstanding something?

I've never been convinced that MIT/BSDish licenses lead to lack of
contribution back to the core. Apple, although not the happiest in the
world about it, I'm sure, has put a lot of effort into making sure many
of their changes to BSD get into the core BSDs they take from, no? Their
graphical interface isn't contributed back, but that's not built on
anything BSD, as far as I'm aware, so that doesn't count as a counter in
my opinion.

In general, companies which get something from Open Source code
typically also give something back, in my experience.

Another important question is how much the projects in question
participate in the open source aspect of their code. For a long time,
WebKit/WebCore, the tech that powers Safari, released sources every time
there was an update. The KHTML team complained that this was *more* of a
pain for them than to not have that happen - it led people to question
why KHTML couldn't just "take Apple's changes and integrate them".

Recently, Apple took the WebKit/WebCore team completely open source -
involving non-Apple employees in the development of the Safari web
browser, as well as completely opening their CVS tree. This decision was
heralded as a great day - not because the software had switched licenses
from LGPL to something more open, but because the *process* had become
more open.

LiveJournal is an open source project. The code is freely available, and
licensed under the GPL. LiveJournal is not an open *community* project,
and this has often led to rifts between the developers who work for
LiveJournal and the volunteer developers who work *on* LiveJournal.
LiveJournal has not, for several years, made a significant effort to
involve their volunteer developer community in their project, and as a
result, the active developer base has atrophied and dwindled to
practically nothing. (Proof of this is available in the fact that the
bug tracking system, a slightly customized version of Bugzilla, has been
completely offline for 6 weeks, with no major effort to get it back
online.)

WebKit/WebCore used to be open source, but not open community/open
development. Changing led to greatly increased participation by the
open source community. LiveJournal has gone the other way, and lost that
participation. I maintain that for the most part, the license the code
is under isn't what makes a difference - it's the attitude of the
company that's behind the code. If you've got people friendly to open
source, they'll do the right thing. If they don't, I don't think that
they're going to be stopped by the fact that the code is GPL, or BSD, or
anything else - in the end, proving that someone took open code and did
something with it becomes really hard, (Isn't this kind of the problem
with Linksys for a long time? They didn't open their code by choice,
iirc) and forcing people to open up is hard too.

Look at the motive and heart behind the effort, not the license of the
code they choose to use, to find the motivation and liklihood of
contributions back, regardless of license.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer
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