Or, how we evaluate a company’s open source-related business strategy.

Godwin’s law states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches”.

An online discussion about open source-related business strategies is no exception. However, long before the Nazi comparison it is inevitable that someone will ask “is MySQL open core?”.

I updated our 2009 post “what is open core, and what isn’t” recently, and received some criticism of my statement that the MySQL strategy was not open core.

Since we have recently published a report including the results of our …

Bradley M Kuhn published an interest blog post at the weekend explaining why he believes Canonical is about to go down the open core licensing route and heavily criticising the company for doing so.

My take on the post is that it is the worst kind of Daily Mail-esque fear mongering and innuendo. Not only does Bradley lack any evidence for his claim, the evidence he presents completely undermines his argument and distracts attention from what could be a very important point about copyright assignment.

The premise? Mark Shuttleworth has admitted that he plans to follow the open core licensing strategy with Canonical.

The evidence? Mark praises the strategy Trolltech took of selling proprietary licenses.

The problem? Trolltech did not follow the open core licensing strategy. Neither did MySQL, which Bradley suggests …

There’s been a fair amount of attention – both positive and negative – on dual licensing in recent weeks. A few days ago Brian Aker wrote: “The fact is, there are few, and growing fewer, opportunities to make money on dual licensing.”

It is a sweeping statement, but one that is worth further consideration, especially since, as Stephen O’Grady noted it is directly contradicted by Gartner’s prediction that: “By 2012, at least 70% of the revenue from commercial OSS will come from vendor-centric projects with dual-license business models.”

Success?

I remember reading this prediction back in December but dismissing it as …

Since the European Commission announced it was opening an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle with a focus on MySQL there has been no shortage of opinion written about Oracle’s impending ownership of MySQL and its impact on MySQL users and commercial partners, as well as MySQL’s business model, dual licensing and the GPL.

In order to try and bring some order to the conversation, we have brought together some of the most referenced blog posts and news stories in chronological order. Part one, below, takes us from the announcement of the EC’s in-depth investigation up to the eve of the communication of the EC’s Statement of Objections. We will continue to update part two until either the acquisition or the EC’s investigation …

Monty Widenius dissects MySQL’s dual license. Intuit moves to the EPL. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Monty Widenius blogged about the apparent changes to the dual licensing of MySQL.

# Intuit announced that its code.intuit.com will be moving from CPL to EPL.

# Matt Asay asked whether Google’s open source advocacy might be a scheme to lower the value of patents.

# Vision Mobile’s Andreas Constantinou explained the differences between open source …

At the 2004 Foo Camp, Danese Cooper, a few other FLOSS advocates (forgive me, Foo Camp is a blur and I don’t remember who you were) and myself gave an ad hoc session on the methods and strategies that we each used to advocate FLOSS and to help people working closed environments become more open.

The session was a blast (and well-received), so much so that Danese and I proposed the session for last year’s OSCON. We didn’t make the cut, but I still tried again for this year’s EuroOSCON and, this time, the session was accepted.

The session should be fun to present, but a bit of a bear to write. I have only 45 minutes to try to fit in the most …