The two strangely contrasting events of Larry Ellison swatting Red Hat and Steve Ballmer embracing Novell’s SuSe Linux should give everyone in the Open Source movement pause for thought. Let’s take these one by one.

Oracle and Red Hat 

In one fell swoop, by offering to support Red Hat Linux, Oracle shot a hole through Red Hat’s business model and unless Red Hat CEO, Matthew Szulik, knows how to pull rabbits out of a hat, Red Hat is on course to lose revenue. Personally, I don’t think there are any rabbits in the hat. The reality is this; Oracle is offering to support Red Hat linux at a lower cost. It won’t even lose money doing this because of the economies of scale that its world wide support operation confers. If you’re responsible for placing the order, who ya gonna call?

Red Hat (and several other Open Source endeavors) were always vulnerable to this, but everyone has been very gentlemanly about it. The truth is that Red Hat has no significant IP to protect itself with.

“Raise the shields Mr Szulik!”

“I’m not sure how to tell you this, Captain Kirk, but there are no shields.”

Microsoft Flirts with SuSE 

The second event, of Steve Ballmer embracing Linux, should be more disturbing to the Open Source community than a broadside from a Romulan Warbird, but it isn’t. Microsoft has admitted defeat and acknowledged that Linux isn’t going away. So it gets all cosy with Novell and indemnifies SuSE Linux from any IP violations that it might be guilty of. From now on, Windows and SuSE Linux will partner.

Does this fork the Linux movement just a little?

The driving force here is that Microsoft has seen the future and it’s full of virtual machines. In a world of virtual machines Windows is at disadvantage because no-one will want to pay for an executable capability—especially when Linux is sitting there all sweet and inexpensive. I’m expecting to see some Microsoft software working on Linux in the future.

So let’s get to the point. Open Source made some very important contributions to the IT industry, but it always was a confused movement. It included a handful of idealists who seemed to believe that software should be free. It included altruists (philanthropists if you like) who did not want to be paid highly for their work, but also wanted to protect it from carpetbaggers. The GPL is perfect for them. It also included people who simply wanted to break software monopolies. The commercial software market made it possible for companies to maintain high prices for software by de facto monopoly (or oligopoly). Open Source undermines all such strangleholds to some degree.

But the Open Source movement also included some entrepreneurs (and VCs) who believed you could run commercially viable operations on the back of Open Source. These are the people who now need to rethink. All such operations are vulnerable to Oracle’s simple and completely legal tactics. Some form of commercial protection is required. There are only two ideas that spring to mind:

1. Mix complementary proprietary software with the Open Source products you supply.

2. Include a restrictive support clause in the License which forces you to take support from a specific provider.