Opinion In IT, there is sexy tech, there is fashionable tech, and there are databases. Your average database has very little charisma, however. Nobody's ever made a movie about one.
They should. They should make lots of movies. (The Reg must note at this point that we're not counting the vendors in this. Some of them have, indeed, spent a bit of money on just such a project.)
You don't have to spend long in any aspect of IT to discover that databases are the soul of IT, its constant animating force. From one perspective, everything digital is a specialized database: word processors, spreadsheets, shoot-em-ups, streaming services, from Google to your disk filing system. The storing, sorting and retrieval of data? That's it. That's the whole game. It has been the case ever since Herman Hollerith designed the punched card tabulating machine in the late nineteenth century.
As for databases that call themselves that, they're the engine of corporate computing. Their capability, reliability and maintainability are essential, and the metrics of performance and expense are unambiguous. Corporate decisions about databases are one of the purest indicators of how IT is sourced and deployed. Hype is quickly exposed, as is the good stuff.
So when you look at the databases developers actually choose, you're seeing a market model with wider implications. Open source versus proprietary, hosted versus on-prem, innovation versus maturity: all primary concerns across IT, all crystallized in DB decisions.
But there's an equally important flip side: how the developers and suppliers of DB software manage to stay in business themselves. That's the other great question of IT in the 2020s: how do you make money either fighting or flaunting FOSS.
That's the first lesson from a feature discussing today's FOSS databases and their respective licensing terms: open source has won. It's about time too. Before FOSS was a corporate option, the big guys were ruthless at monetizing their position in the heart ofIT.
Licensing models were set at what clients could bear, not what was equitable. Random audits could turn accidental license breaches into very expensive mistakes, and it could be very hard to manage those licenses if you were trying to scale. Or if license management was curiously difficult.
Why did anyone put up with this? They had to: these were the costs of mitigating the risk of ushering in unknowns to the galactic center of your company business model.
Times change, but memories abide. It is hard to overstate the organizational resentment towards what looks, feels and costs like extortion, or the readiness to explore options that do not have that particular pistol to point. Momentum has built for FOSS, as more people use and develop it.The quality and variety of the code has increased and deployment edged deeper into risk-averse, and rich, areas of the market.
There is a lag between what developers choose and what is actually deployed, but the trend is unambiguous and continuous. Proprietary has lost and is losing market share, open source has and is gaining. By some measures Oracle was just about equal to MySQL in 2021. Guess which is sliding down the snake, and which is climbing the ladder.
This is it. This is the canonical proof that open source can achieve everything needed for corporate software, when there's a big enough community of motivated developers. Can it in turn support that community?
Again, looking at databases in particular gives a good lens for the bigger picture. FOSS was born of idealism, frustration, opportunity and optimism. It recognized the inequity of centralized control of software, born of a time when entry costs to making software were very high and distribution very difficult, in an environment when neither situation was still the case. Like so many successful revolutions, the very act of winning changed the dynamics that made the win possible.
The ideal FOSS license is completely unrestrained: take the code, do what you like, just ask those who come after to do the same. That works in many cases, where those who do most of the work can parlay their expertise into business relationships.
However, it doesn't work so well in the age of hyperscalers, where hosted services can craft deals that require minimal interaction and risk for clients, based on FOSS running behind an API. Hence the advent of ideas like BSL, the Business Source License, that fulfils part of the FOSS ideal by making source open, but restricts commercial use. That can be any commercial use, or specific cases like selling a hosted service - something that databases are very well suited for.
Is this betrayal of FOSS? Many think so, and in a model that relies on community as a proxy for closed-door development, that could be fatal. Or is it a sensible evolution, absorbing a very well-tested model of free for non-commercial use, subsidized by production use, that's been part of proprietary for decades?
The real danger isn't some dilution of FOSS ethics, but the resurgence of lock-in. While BSL and its ilk has that danger, so does any FOSS project too dependent on a powerful sponsor. The fact that the code is open is a strong safeguard: that which can be rewritten cannot be constrained. Ask IBM about its proprietary but visible PC BIOS.
This is an evolving market, but it's evolving into a more just, more sustainable and more flexible one as FOSS ideas change the landscape.
You'll have problems if you change your model in ways your initial supporters didn't expect so be aware of how the evolution is progressing and build in your long-term options at the start. If you're as open about your plans as you are about your software, that's good enough.
The evolution of the dull old database not only predicts the future, it's helping to define it. And that's as sexy as any tech gets.
More here:
Want to know the future of FOSS? You can look it up in a database - The Register
- Calls to Ban Open Source are Misguided and Dangerous - The New Stack - June 26th, 2024
- Delving the Risks and Rewards of the Open-Source Ecosystem - InformationWeek - June 26th, 2024
- Enhancing security through collaboration with the open-source community - Help Net Security - June 18th, 2024
- It's time to face the open source security problem - ITPro - June 18th, 2024
- Mistral AI just launched 'Codestral', its own competitor to Code Llama and GitHub Copilot and it's fluent in over 80 ... - ITPro - June 2nd, 2024
- Open-source cybersecurity could derail the internet as we know it - Quartz - May 15th, 2024
- Developer Experience Influenced by Open Source Culture - InfoQ.com - May 15th, 2024
- BLint: Open-source tool to check the security properties of your executables - Help Net Security - May 15th, 2024
- Modular Open-Sources Mojo: The Programming Language that Turns Python into a Beast - MarkTechPost - April 2nd, 2024
- Meet the 21-Year-Old Creator of Devika, the Indian Open Source Devin Alternative - Analytics India Magazine - April 2nd, 2024
- Is Open Source Under Threat or Primed to Go to the Next Level? - The New Stack - March 13th, 2024
- Where is Technology Headed in 2024? - Open Source For You - March 13th, 2024
- A Detailed Conversation on Open-Source AI Frameworks for MLOps Workflows and Projects - AiThority - March 5th, 2024
- Everything you need to know about GitHub's new push protection changes - ITPro - March 5th, 2024
- StarCoder 2 is a code-generating AI that runs on most GPUs - TechCrunch - March 5th, 2024
- Is the future of open source software at risk due to protestware? - Tech Xplore - February 25th, 2024
- Google unveils new family of open-source AI models called Gemma to take on Meta and othersdeciding open-source AI aint so bad after all - Fortune - February 25th, 2024
- Jim Zemlin and the Linux Foundation share not-so-secret open-source sauce - ZDNet - February 25th, 2024
- Open source vs closed source AI: What's the difference and why does it matter? - Euronews - February 25th, 2024
- Biden administration to debate whether all AI systems should be open-source or closed - Firstpost - February 25th, 2024
- Some Linkerd service mesh users will soon have to pay - TechTarget - February 25th, 2024
- A lone developer just open sourced a tool that could bring an end to Nvidia's AI hegemony AMD financed it for ... - TechRadar - February 25th, 2024
- Scoping Out the Software-Defined Vehicle: The Benefits of OTA Updates & Open Source - Embedded Computing Design - February 25th, 2024
- The importance and limitations of open source AI models - TechTarget - February 9th, 2024
- 15+ Popular Python IDEs in 2024: Choosing The Best One - Simplilearn - February 9th, 2024
- Balancing Innovation and Security: The Open-Source Conundrum - BNN Breaking - February 9th, 2024
- VCs and startups love open-source AI models but how will they make money? - Sifted - February 9th, 2024
- How better and cheaper software could save millions of dollars while improving Canada's health-care system - The Conversation Indonesia - February 9th, 2024
- Best of 2023: Are We Witnessing the End of Open Source? - DevOps.com - December 28th, 2023
- What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it - The Register - December 28th, 2023
- 200 GB of GTA 5 source code is about to get leaked, making it an open source: Report - Sportskeeda - December 28th, 2023
- Never was so much owed by so many to so few - a look at the unheralded heroes of the open source world - TechRadar - December 28th, 2023
- Rockstar hit with another cyberattack, leaked GTA 5 source code reveal cancelled DLC plans - Times of India - December 28th, 2023
- What is open source software? - Android Police - December 20th, 2023
- Feds Warn Health Sector to Watch for Open-Source Threats - BankInfoSecurity.com - December 11th, 2023
- OpenTofu: Open-source alternative to Terraform - Help Net Security - December 11th, 2023
- AWS exec: 'Our understanding of open source has started to change' - The Register - December 11th, 2023
- Mark Jelic Rings in 40 Years Since the TEC-1 Launch with a New, Open Source, Upgraded TEC-1G SBC - Hackster.io - December 11th, 2023
- AI's future could be 'open-source' or closed. Tech giants are divided as they lobby regulators - Tech Xplore - December 11th, 2023
- Cyber Security Today, Nov. 24, 2023 A warning to tighten security on Kubernetes containers, and more - IT World Canada - November 25th, 2023
- This AI Paper Proposes ML-BENCH: A Novel Artificial Intelligence Approach Developed to Assess the Effectiveness of LLMs in Leveraging Existing... - November 25th, 2023
- Generative AI is a genuine breakthrough unlike most fads in tech: Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh on the current waves in tech - The Hindu - October 27th, 2023
- Meet RedPajama: An AI Project to Create Fully Open-Source Large Language Models Beginning with the Release of a 1.2 Trillion Token Dataset -... - April 25th, 2023
- Hashtag Trending Apr.24th- Cybersecurity workers burnout; Code generated by ChatGPT and Googles Bard not very secure; Execs would want a robot to make... - April 25th, 2023
- This AI Project Brings Doodles to Life with Animation and Releases Annotated Dataset of Amateur Drawings - MarkTechPost - April 17th, 2023
- EU shares best practices with Ukrainian law enforcers on Open Source Intelligence and Criminal Analysis to - EIN News - April 8th, 2023
- 'I've never seen anything like this:' One of China's most popular apps has the ability to spy on its users, say experts - CNN - April 8th, 2023
- With Just ~20 Lines of Python Code, You can Do Retrieval Augmented GPT Based QA Using This Open Source Repository Called PrimeQA - MarkTechPost - March 5th, 2023
- Daily Crunch: Hundreds of Salesforce workers laid off in January just discovered they were out of work today - TechCrunch - February 7th, 2023
- Unlocking the power of Open AI: how to automate information extraction - The Hindu - February 7th, 2023
- Is composable business most essential technology trend to meet challenges of 2023 and beyond? - ComputerWeekly.com - January 30th, 2023
- Open Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com - January 22nd, 2023
- 529 Synonyms & Antonyms of OPEN - Merriam-Webster - January 22nd, 2023
- Open Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster - January 22nd, 2023
- Can Wazuh Become The Worlds Largest Open Source Cybersecurity Platform And IPO Without VC Funding? - Forbes - January 6th, 2023
- 8 Free/Open Source Code Review Tools for 2022 - SoftwareSuggest - December 28th, 2022
- Finding the next Log4j OpenSSFs Brian Behlendorf on pivoting to a risk-centred view of open source development - The Daily Swig - December 28th, 2022
- Nithin Kamath says FOSS is the 'pillar' on which Zerodha has been built. What is it? - Business Today - December 28th, 2022
- How Dogeliens Will Take Over the Metaverse Like Bitcoin and Stellar Took Over the Crypto World. - newsbtc.com - December 28th, 2022
- Intrinsic Buys Open Robotics' Commercial Arm, But Leaves ROS and Gazebo with the Foundation - Hackster.io - December 20th, 2022
- Open-source code is everywhere; GitHub expands security tools to help ... - December 20th, 2022
- Security Of Enterprise Code: What Companies Using Open-Source Software Should Know About Binary Code Verification - Forbes - December 20th, 2022
- Open Source - Apple Developer - December 12th, 2022
- Your Code of Conduct | Open Source Guides - December 12th, 2022
- Code of Conduct | Meta Open Source - Facebook - December 12th, 2022
- From the creator of Homebrew, Tea raises $8.9M to build a protocol that helps open source developers get paid - TechCrunch - December 12th, 2022
- Consortium of Japan partners successfully promote domestic production and cost reduction for 5G core technology, the basis for next-generation... - November 25th, 2022
- GitHub Vulnerability Allows Hackers to Hijack Thousands of Popular Open-Source Packages - CPO Magazine - November 17th, 2022
- GitHubs Octoverse report finds 97% of apps use open source software - VentureBeat - November 17th, 2022
- Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot - BleepingComputer - November 7th, 2022
- The White House Memorandum on Securing the Software Supply Chain: What It Means for Your Organization - Security Boulevard - November 7th, 2022
- First Timers Only - Get involved in Open Source and commit code to your ... - October 23rd, 2022
- List of free and open-source software packages - Wikipedia - October 23rd, 2022
- What is open source? - Red Hat - October 23rd, 2022
- Introducing Triton: Open-Source GPU Programming for Neural Networks - October 23rd, 2022
- Comparison of open-source and closed-source software - October 23rd, 2022
- Java 19 Brings New Patterns to Open Source Programming Language - October 23rd, 2022
- API series - OctoML: ML APIs need to take a lesson from their ancestors - ComputerWeekly.com - October 23rd, 2022
- Benefits of working with open source data quality solutions - TechRepublic - October 15th, 2022
- Microsoft's GitHub Copilot AI is making rapid progress. Here's how its human leader thinks about it - CNBC - October 15th, 2022