The Commercialisation of Open Source

Yesterday Novell and Microsoft make an announcement of a partnership. Previously Oracle made an announcement about support for Red Hat.

It would seem from these announcement that the next wave of commercialisation of a sector of Open Source has begun. Simon Phipps of Sun had an interesting angle on the story.

I have to admit that I don’t understand all of the wheels within wheels here. The complexity is the issue though. Each time something like this happens it creates confusion and most corporates hate confusion.

The people that really get hurt by the confusion are the small organisations seeking to make their presence felt – I’d include Novell and Red Hat in this. Oracle and Microsoft are the real winners here with HP, IBM and Sun doing very nicely too.

It’s really difficult being in the middle. The small business and personal users of Open Source software don’t want to pay for support, the larger organisations need stability and will keep, for the most part, with tried and trusted suppliers.

Red Hat and Novel, if you want to survive you need to create stability and remove all the confusion.