A few years ago people were developing Open Source software and selling support. The software was completely free and professional support cost money, I was a hundred percent happy with this model and we even bought support on a few products. It was a good thing.
A couple years ago or so a trend starting developing where companies were releasing their software as both a commercial offering and Open Source. Some of them give you more features with the "enterprise" or "commercial" version and those features were not released as source. When this trend started I thought "okay, this might not be a bad thing." It really wasn't at first, it encouraged more companies to get involved and was a good thing in general. I was always lukewarm about this model but it seemed that it was a good way to get some money pumping into the community and let some projects really take off that deserved the attention. Wow was I naive and missing the point.
The part I was missing is that these companies were venture capital funded and that buyouts were the new Initial Public Offerings. What has started happening is that these companies are being bought up left and right and their Open Source offspring are in jeopardy. Secretly I knew they were venture backed but I missed the bigger consequences here.
Let's take the current internal mail server we use. It's called Zimbra and they have two versions a commercial version (with backup features and mobility features) and an Open Source version which is practically identical save the two mentioned features. We use the "enterprise" version because we require the mobility features and like having automated backups, it's been a pretty good thing. One of the primary reasons we chose Zimbra is that a) it's based on all open technologies, b) it allows us to easily share calendars and c) it's not Microsoft's Exchange. Guess which one was most important?
Fast forward a year and a half or so later. Yahoo buys Zimbra and I was disheartened but it was okay because Yahoo had a pretty decent Open Source track record and I slept alright after that deal. Fast forward a few months later and Microsoft makes an unsolicited bid for Yahoo. I almost passed out when I read that news and am greatly saddened by the prospect. Now it may come to nothing, perhaps Yahoo can pass up the 44 + billion dollars and all will be well and I can sleep easier. Unfortunately that's not in my personality.
The lesson I learned here and it's one that I've known forever but just didn't apply in this case. NEVER compromise your principles. My principles have always been that in general a lot of Open Source solutions are simply better than their commercial counterparts and should be used wherever possible. I have very few exceptions, firewalls being one of them but I still like them to be open and accessible for tweaking.
My mistake was in thinking "oh it's okay this company is benevolent and cares about community involvement." What I should have thought was "what happens if the nightmare scenario happens." I'm a security guy, that should ALWAYS be my line of thinking. What I was missing is that it doesn't matter who "owns" the technology, the problem is that it's owned. No free as in freedom or beer! No one's perfect but I'm pretty hard on myself when something like this happens and so I'm going to atone for my sins right now, I hope.
My commitment going forward is that, save our firewalls and virtual machine (maybe) technologies, we will be 100% Open Source by the end of this year. This may not matter to anyone outside Hurricane Labs but it's a big deal for us given that we support a number of community projects and are always preaching that Open Source is the way to go. No more hybrid licenses, no more hoping a company doesn't get bought out. Luckily we're in a good position here, we only have a few services that rely on these hybrid sorts of things. I'll keep updating here as we make progress, it should be quite an adventure, wish us luck!
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