So Oracle want’s the community to figure out Oralcs’s Open Source Business Model for them. One of Oracle’s lead engineers has challenged the community to:
Show us a plan for how that will ultimately generate revenue for Oracle? The “just do it and see what happens” idea won’t fly –
management will need to have a real plan. Ideally backed up with some research (marketing numbers, etc.) or other evidence. Remember, this is
a real business with millions of real dollars invested in it — its not some high school economics research project.
That’s pathetic. What kind of business asks it’s customers to justify it’s business model? “Prove to me how I make money of selling tomatoes at the current price or we will start selling it at USD 1000 a pop.” No you won’t, because nobody will be buying them. Jonathan Schwartz knew that Solaris in a world of Linux was actually an liability if sold. So he gave it away to minimize this liability and maybe helped push a few boxes in the process.
Martin,
This post is a little unfair. You state “Oracle wants the community…” as if this was an official request from yet the engineer in question stated in an immediate follow up[1] “I speak for nobody but myself, and have little or no influence over any meaningful decisions at Oracle.”
Rather than attack him for his efforts I think he should be praised. Frankly I applaud him for asking the community to give him ammunition he could take to management to sell them on the idea of open-source. He’s a engineer focused on technology, not a business unit manager focused on business models. But he knows that a profitable public company with a fiduciary to its shareholders won’t make the decision to go open-source unless they have a strong business case and since “everyone” is smarter than “anyone”, he thought that there may have been some benefit in crowd-sourcing.
Sadly, the ones I’d take to task here are not him but those who responded to him in an ideological fashion rather than addressing the real concern he put forth.
Anyway, JMTCW.
[1] http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2010-April/007779.html
Mike,
Thanks for the comment. First of all the caveat in his follow-up only applies to – the follow-up:
Secondly the idea that a lead engineer could make a post like that (using the “we” form etc.) and not expect it to be read as a message from his employer is slightly naive.
Exactly because he is an engineer he should stay away from crowd-sourcing business models or do it in a way that doesn’t read as an implicit threat that his new employer will stop playing nice with the community. A threat which they have later made good on by the way.