Don't Let Apple Scare You Away From Open Source

Earlier this week, Ben Kepes reported here on Forbes that Apple  acquired enterprise database startup FoundationDB. As often happens in these situations, FoundationDB stopped accepting new customers for its paid services. But the company's code repository was also emptied or made private, leaving third party developers dependent upon open source code associated with this database with no official place to get it. Some have been quick to suggest this is a good reason not to build products or services that rely upon open source software. It would be a mistake to believe them.

When companies get acquired, their new owners often change the way that products and other assets are made available to others. When Apple acquired Siri back in 2010, the existing iPhone app disappeared. Apple's version of Siri didn't see the light of day for over a year. Wal-Mart bought a startup called Luvocracy last year. They had half a million members, and Wal-Mart shut them down. Business intelligence startup DataPad was also acquired last year. They had almost $2 million in VC funding, and users, and buyer Cloudera shut them down. The list goes on, and on, and on. Acquisitions cause popular commercial products to disappear. Acquisitions make much-liked tools morph in ways that loyal users rarely like. Acquisitions lead to open source projects closing down. But acquisitions also give popular but under-funded solutions the fresh injection of cash, enthusiasm or talent they need to reach the next level. And acquisitions may push small and notionally open projects, setting them free from a parent company, gifting them to a more stable open source home (like the Apache Software Foundation, for example), and pushing sponsorship dollars at nurturing a community of enthusiasts and champions. Acquisitions aren't all bad.

Open source software is certainly not the only choice for powering an enterprise application or workflow, but it is an increasingly important way to benefit cost-effectively from the work of a broad community you can't afford to directly employ. Open source operating system Linux successfully challenged the dominance of Solaris, Windows and various commercial variants of Unix, at least in the data center. Open source web server Apache powers over half of the world's active websites, according to Netcraft. But, far more important than these complete solutions, open source tools, components, and collections of functionality provide developers with a rich and expansive toolkit for building and maintaining their own applications.

FoundationDB's core product wasn't open source. It was freely available for download and use (within some constraints), but it was licensed under FoundationDB's own license.

The license or contract under which a piece of software is made available doesn't really say much about the likelihood that the company behind it will continue to provide and support whatever it is they wrote. But, as Ben notes in his post, the growth of open source communities (like the Apache Software Foundation, the OpenStack Foundation, Higher Education's Apereo Foundation, and others) offers some degree of comfort. No one vendor can pull the plug on a project, or remove all of the code from public view. While there is interest and value in the outputs from the community, there's scope for it to survive and even thrive.

There are many reasons for choosing one product over another. Fitness for purpose, cost, adoption, roadmap, community, and more. In most cases, the fact that a product or solution is backed by an open source license and an open source community should be considered positively, not negatively.

Don't let mis-reporting of this story lead you to dismiss open source, next time you're searching for a solution.