October 8th, 2008
Changing open source terms bad move in a recession
In a time of recession people look closely at the fine print.
They want everything they are entitled to, and will not spend a penny more than they have to.
It’s a bad time to change your terms in search of support contracts, as SpringSource learned recently.
In a bid to raise enterprise contract revenues, SpringSource decided last month to limit updates for its community version. Now it has reversed course, CEO Rod Johnson explaining things in this blog post.
Some have stated concerns that Spring would cease to be open source. The phrase “license change” kept being bandied around—despite the fact that we were not changing the licenses of any Spring code. While such speculation was unfounded, it’s still concerning.
Both the action, and reaction, were born out of fear, which needs no reason.
It’s possible that in flush times these changes might have stuck. They were not license changes. They reflected only terms under which SpringSource would give away code. It’s a corporate-managed code base used mainly by enterprises.
But life is unfair, and now SpringSource has to live through stories telling people who never heard of it how it tried to grab code out of the hands of script kiddies. Or not give them updates.
All this hurts its position as it tries to dance the survival dance with other players in enterprise open source. A lot of open source companies will merge or combine or sink in the next several months, and this was no time to stick a fork in the liferaft.
Don’t make the same mistake.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
