Do you smell a rat?  I do.  Actually, I smell many.

In the past few months, as success of open source in several markets has sunk in, a number of players in those markets have started to behave very badly.

I am not talking about the old, everyday proprietary vendor FUD – that’s an old story, and has become painfully cliché by now.  FUD has been part of the software game for a long time, but it has certainly lost a lot of efficiency against open source – only the most laggard still dare to call open source “trialware for non-strategic projects”.  Maybe the numerous deals they’ve lost in the past 18 months to enterprise open source vendors have forced everyone else to revise their position…?

I am actually talking about several categories of rats:

• those who have adopted “faux-pen source” strategies (from the French “faux” which means fake, and “open source”, which means… great!) after attacking open source
• those who continue to attack open source for their own benefit
• and – how could we forget? – those who walk away from open source

In the first category (faux-pen source), you find the “rats” who have spent years claiming that “free stuff” provides no value and is a mere copy of traditional software.  They mocked users of open source software who were “getting what they paid for”.  Now, all of a sudden, “free” is the new great thing, and they’ve jumped on the bandwagon and released free versions of their own.

Problem is, it’s only free as in “free beer”. And guess what: it’s not even really that.  All they’ve done is repurpose their trial version to entice new users to their functional, expensive product.

It’s definitely not free as in “free speech”.  This kind of software lacks the fundamental freedoms of open source (freedom to use, freedom to modify, freedom to redistribute).  And, subsequently, it lacks the openness of the entire supporting ecosystem of open source solutions: no free extensions/connectors contributed by the community, no free support via the forums, no free access to the bug tracking system, etc.

Even worse, there are no guarantees for the long run.  If the faux-pen source vendor decides to stop supporting its “free” version, what happens to someone who has gone to production with it?  Tough luck… Hold on, I see – maybe the vendor will accept their money to upgrade them to the paying version?

Real open source solutions do not present these issues.  Why?  Because their open nature invites the community to contribute, and the open source license model guarantees their indefinite availability (via forks if needed).

In the second category (the ones who keep going after open source), you find all sorts of “rats” who attack without real arguments, mostly to get visibility.  For example, I can think of a SaaS vendor who enjoys picking on “the lies” of open core, but who will carefully avoid any discussion about who owns the data stored in their SaaS application, and what happens to this data (and their code logic!) if they go belly up.

(Which “lies” would they be referring to, BTW? The vast majority of open core vendors are very clear about what is free and what is commercial, as highlighted by Matt Aslett in his open core transparency test).

This is all marketing – pick a target, throw some mud at it, and if some of it sticks you may become a hero.  So far, it’s not working…

Then, you have the vendors who (quietly) walk away from open source.  Some “rats” choose to ride the open source wave when they start, but they are not really open source.  Maybe they are from the licensing standpoint, but not culturally.  So it doesn’t work out, and at the end of the day, it’s too costly for them to have the constraints of open source without getting its rewards.  So they walk away and go back to being proprietary.  Some of them are successful (at being quiet, anyway), some less so.  But it can’t be good for their image in the community… that is, unless they never had a community.

OK, so the vendors who realize they cannot sustain an open source model are not directly attacking open source (although… since they are now proprietary vendors, they probably will resort to good ol’ FUD).   I’ll still call them rats, because they use open source as a launch pad to get initial traction, but fail to deliver on their promise to the community.

That’s lots of rodents out there.  We need to stock up on rat poison. Anyone knows a good brand?

Yves