Open sourcing more software and business
It's been a big month for open source – quite a few companies have announced open source plans, and I'm not just talking about using more open source software but actually open sourcing software, data or APIs.
Here are some of the ones I've heard of. They aren't all open sourcing large software programs, but they are all opening up some aspect of their development process to the general public.
- Eudora. Qualcomm announced they are open sourcing Eudora, the email program, next year. They are going to continue to sell it this year at a discounted price that includes some support calls. They will honor all existing support contracts but it looks like they won't be selling anymore. They are quite clear that they are exiting the email software business because it's not part of their core competency and they are open sourcing the software to allow their customers to continue to use it. They did a good job of setting up an FAQ with most questions (with a few missing – like which license will it be under?) but what will be interesting to see is the transition. Where will the source code be hosted? Will Qualcomm employees continue to support it for a while as the community builds up? Will they try to recruit a community or will they just put it out there and wait and see? Will all of the code be there? Will the build environment be easy to replicate? Will the exiting bug database be ported over? In other words, will it launch as a working OSS project or will it need some work to get there? The time frame and advance notice implies that they are doing some work on it – my guess is they are doing an extensive legal and technical review.And then there's the question of whether somebody will start offering support for the open source version for all of those existing customers … OpenLogic will offer support if our customers want it.
- Yahoo announced that they will be opening up their email program. They did say "open up" and not open source. They are hoping people develop new email applications on top of their code base – they are not looking for people to add on to and support the Yahoo email program, so it'll be more of a Google or Flickr model. Open APIs that people can use to create applications like all the ones around Google Maps. The code should be available sometime later this year …
- MySQL Forge. MySQL announced a new community edition of MySQL as well as a new monitoring feature that will only be a available in the Enterprise edition. The idea is that the each edition will be able to cater more to its set of users instead of keeping just one set of features and services for both audiences. (Although they don't plan for the products to fork.) In his blog, Kaj Arno, their community VP says, "With this differentiation, we aim to better serve both categories of MySQL users — those who are willing to spend time to save money, and those who are willing to spend money to save time."
It sounds like the community edition will have more liberal license policies than before so that non-GPL products can be integrated with MySQL solving one of the dilemnas that the open source community has. - Mac OS Forge. Supposedly a place for open source Mac OS projects but the site has been down for over a month for "system improvements."
- Netflix. Netflix isn't open sourcing anything but they are allowing the public to access a lot of data about user movie ratings and challenging them to come up with a movie recommendation algorithm better than the one they have now. (And offering quite a bit of money, $1 million, to the first successful person.) They also state that the winner should describe how they did it to the world. So it's not open sourcing anything they own but it's encouraging the community to participate in a challenging product and "open sourcing" the data necessary to do so.
All of these announcements show that corporate America is embracing the open community development model. There's a way to productively engage your users in order to make not just a better product but products you haven't dreamed of yet.
