Oracle Bought Sun and Showed What It Thinks Open Source Is For

When Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems at the start of this year, it acquired a strange portfolio. Sun had spent its last decade turning its crown jewels into open-source projects: Solaris, Java, the OpenOffice suite, MySQL, the Hudson build server. Some of these were released under free licences with real communities around them. Sun's bet was that openness would keep the technology relevant when the hardware business could not.

Eight months in, we know what Oracle thinks that portfolio is for. It is worth writing down while the pattern is fresh.

OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris was the open-source version of Sun's operating system, with a community, a release schedule and a governing board. Under Oracle the releases stopped. The community waited for a statement, got none, and this month the governing board dissolved itself. Oracle's position, as far as anyone can tell from its actions, is that Solaris source will appear after releases rather than before them, if at all.

An open-source project is not the code. It is the process by which outsiders can see and shape the code as it is written. Remove that and you have a source drop, which is a different thing wearing the same licence.

The Java Lawsuit

This week Oracle sued Google, claiming that Android's use of Java infringes patents and copyrights Oracle now owns. Sun had spent years positioning Java as an open platform, releasing its implementation under the GPL and publicly welcoming Android. Oracle inherited the platform and, within months, used it as the basis for a lawsuit against the most successful thing built on it.

Whatever the courts decide, the message to anyone building on Java is delivered: the openness of the platform lasts exactly as long as the owner finds it convenient. A promise that is not legally binding is a mood, and moods change with ownership.

Hudson and OpenOffice

Two smaller episodes point the same way.

Hudson, the continuous-integration server that a large part of the industry runs its builds on, was developed in the open under Sun. Oracle has asserted control over the project's name and infrastructure, and the developers are openly discussing whether they will have to move the project elsewhere and rename it to keep working on it the way they always have.

OpenOffice's community, likewise, has begun talking about a foundation of its own. When a project's contributors start planning how to leave, the owner has already told them something.

The Pattern

None of these events is individually shocking. Companies discontinue products, enforce patents and protect trademarks all the time. What is instructive is seeing them all at once, applied to a portfolio that was assembled on the opposite premise.

Sun's theory was that open source is a strategy: give away the platform, build the ecosystem, sell what the ecosystem needs. Oracle's theory, revealed by its conduct, is that open source is an asset: something you own, and therefore something you can close, sue over, or take back.

The difference is not in the licence. It is in whether the owner regards the community as a partner or as a liability. Sun, for all its failures, regarded it as a partner. Oracle regards it as a set of people using property.

What Should Follow

There are two lessons, and they are not about Oracle.

The first is for anyone who relies on a project owned by a single company: the licence tells you what you may do with the code you already have, and nothing more. It does not tell you whether the next version will exist, or be open, or be free of lawsuits. Those depend on the owner, and the owner can change on a Friday.

The second is for the projects themselves. The ones that will survive this year are the ones whose community is able to fork and carry on: to take the code, rename it, and keep the process alive without the owner's permission. That capacity, not the licence text, is what makes a project genuinely open. Hudson's developers understand this and are preparing for it. So is the OpenOffice community. The OpenSolaris community, which depended on Oracle to keep releasing, has learned it the hard way.

Oracle has done the open-source world a small service, then. It has shown, in one calendar year and with one portfolio, exactly which kind of openness is real and which kind was only ever a corporate policy.