I've written before about the sometimes negative impact that commercial vendors can have on open source projects.  (See Should commercial open source vendors "own" an open source community?)  Some business models and business practices of open source vendors (trying to control all committers and commits, withholding enhancements and fixes from community versions, etc) seem to turn an open source project into something that looks a lot like a proprietary software product.  Unfortunately, these practices are becoming more and more prevalent.

I'm not against commercial vendors making money from open source.  In fact, we do it at OpenLogic by selling support, services and tools around open source.  But I'm convinced that if open source vendors take this trend towards more control too far, it could backfire on them.  Communities could decide to take back control by forking or creating new competing projects. 

Here's an example of how that may be playing out.  Stephen O'Grady at RedMonk writes about this in a recent post about MySQL.  In it he describes the implications of MySQL's the dual licensing model:

 "A single entity such as MySQL is responsible for the overwhelming majority of all development on a given codebase. Anything they don’t produce themselves, they license. Very often this is practiced in conjunction with the dual-license model; because MySQL is responsible for virtually all of the development of the core code, they own or have licensed appropriately all of the involved IP. As such, they’re free to issue commercial licenses to those who would cannot or choose not to comply with the terms of the open source license – the GPL, in this case."

But according to Stephen, this model also has a significant downfall.

"Stated more simply: as long as MySQL remains committed to the dual licensing model, it will be unable to accept the same patch set that open source only versions of the code can, because they do not share the same licensing concerns. "

In the case of MySQL, the result is that other projects are popping up to offer "better versions" of MySQL that includes patches from the community or to offer alternatives to MySQL.  Although, to date, this has not had a significant impact on MySQL, I can see that it could in the future.  In their understandable search for revenue, commercial open source vendors could find that the community model they embrace could backfire. 

I personally like the idea that the open source communities (with the benefit of open source licenses) can provide checks and balances to keep commercial open source vendors true to the open source development model.

One of the most popular categories of open source software is undoubtedly application servers. JBoss, Geronimo, and Tomcat are practically household names to anyone with even a passing familiarity with open source. But like any software package, every open source application server comes with its own pros and cons. Selecting the right open source application server for your environment requires detailed functional evaluations and important technology decisions on topics like EJB2 compatibility and OSGi. Further complicating the selection process is the recent release of the SpringSource dm Server, which abandons the EJB world altogether.

With this ever-shifting landscape, it's important to stay abreast of the latest developments and ensure that your organization is using the open source application servers that best suit your current and future needs and initiatives. Get a leg up on this important topic by attending our next technical webinar, “A Comparison of Open Source Application Servers for the Enterprise,” which will be held on Thursday, December 11.

Presented by Rod Cope, our CTO and Founder, and Veljko Krunic, our Senior Consultant, this webinar will compare JBoss, Glassfish, Geronimo, Tomcat, and the new SpringSource dm Server. In addition to core features and reliability, Rod and Veljko will discuss:

• EJB3 vs. Spring
• Spring on a dm Server vs. J2EE/JEE server
• OSGi
• EJB 2 compatibility

If you're currently evaluating application servers, plan to begin an evaluation in the near future, or simply want to stay abreast of new trends in open source application servers, please be sure to join us on December 11 at 11:00 Pacific / 2:00 Eastern.

And don't forget — the webinar library on our corporate website offers free downloads of the slides and recordings from all previous OpenLogic webinars, including “A Comparison of Open Source Reporting Tools for the Enterprise” and “A Comparison of Open Source Scripting Languages for the JVM.”