A pointer from Mike Sax led me to venture capitalist Tim Oren's weblog entry about open source software as a business model. Oren raises the case of MySQL's two-track licensing: a GPL license for open source developers, and a commercial license for those who want to write commercial, non-open source applications with it. The commercial license protects developers against the “viral” nature of the GPL, meaning that anything they do with the code can be kept proprietary. (Novell recently acquired a commercial license of MySQL for its new version of NetWare.)

That's an intriguing approach–one I had been aware of before, but I hadn't really considered the the implications of it. The commercial license includes access to the MySQL JDBC, ODBC and C-based database access drivers from MySQL AB, which are not open source. Developers building pure open source applications can use MySQL freely under the GPL license; anybody who wants to tweak the code of MySQL itself has to buy a commercial license.

Again–the core is GPL; the tools to exploit the core for commercial purposes are not. Open source development is encouraged, while a revenue stream–the real revenue stream, in my mind–is maintained.

Alan Williamson and Simon Phipps are playing a bit of “point-counterpoint” on the profitability of open source. What's interesting here is that Simon, the Sun insider, is the one taking the pro-open source position. [Of course, Simon has been taking that position for quite some time, so it's not really that interesting. ]

I've had a bit of debate with some others over this issue myself. How, one friend asked, can Sun take Java (for example) open source when Jonathan Schwartz is shifting its whole business model toward software?

As Simon says (no pun intended), that question is based on confusion between a development methodology and a business model. Sun owns more than just Java–it owns a stack of software and services built upon Java. The Java language development process is a money-losing effort for Sun–it makes all its money off of the technology that is built on top of that language. So, if Sun were to pull, say, a C# with Java and make the language itself an open standard, while keeping its pieces of the runtime technology proprietary, it would still be able to derive a profit from its products built on Java and improve the cost structure (and the quality) of the maintenance of the underlying programming language.

There are already major chunks of Java technology in the open source domain–Tomcat and JBoss come to mind. But what Sun really needs to do is open up the language itself to the community, while continuing to build a profitable business further up the stack, so to speak.