IBM on the GPL (We don't like you very much)

Saying IBM is a fan of any open source software that it can incorporate into its products (or product line) without giving anything back. is a bit short sighted. Besides the open source projects you listed, IBM is a huge supporter of Eclipse, Mozilla and Apache. I would stipulate that IBM is one of the primary contributors to open source projects. They give a ton back, why is it so bad they want to sell commercial software?

The impresssion I was getting from Bob Sutor is that they are willing to accept it, so this one's rather surprising.

To say that IBM does not give anything back to open source is simply and sadly ignorant. The Eclipse Foundation and the enormous amount of time and code donated to bootstrap it, was started by IBM. They donated millions of dollars worth of time and code to Eclipse, now the leading Java IDE and a pioneer in the area of rich client platforms.
It is sad to see a respected journal like Info World publish such a blatantly ignorant and one-sided view.

Last week, the trade journal CRN tried to drag Mills into the ongoing GPLv3 controversy... On Tuesday, my friend Matt Asay (co-founder of OSBC and former Novell OSS strategist) slammed Mills. … I think highly of Matt Asay, but his love affair with the GPL is silly.

I think people are missing my point. I know that IBM contributes to Eclipse, etc. It does a tremendous amount for Apache, Linux, Eclipse, etc. No question.

My point is that IBM has failed to figure out a model for how it can monetize open source directly, and I think this is a big weakness, because it means the company must always depend on proprietary licenses to sell software. IBM is very generous with anyone and anything that will drive a stake into the heart of its competitors - that's great business. But the fact that it only knows how to deal in complements is, in my mind, a weakness.

Not today, but longer term as more of the world moves to pureplay open source models. I'm confident that it will.

Even if I stipulate your (plausible) point about the right way to run an OSS pureplay, why does IBM have to bow down at that altar? There's room for more than one business model in the IT industry or even in software.

C'mon, Matt, you have more than just a hammer in your box of business tools. Stop trying to treat everything as a nail -- for some problems a wrench or screwdriver works better.

Apparently you have forgotten that I have used many different tools in my open source career. I spent most of it in hybrid land. There's a reason I've gravitated to the GPL over 10 years in the industry. I've been doing this for as long as IBM has, and I've come to a very different conclusion. Could it be that this decision is in part influenced by the fact that I don't have a billion-dollar business to protect?

Instead, I have billion-dollar businesses to kill and a billion-dollar business to build. Funny how the tools one uses change based on how much incumbency one is forced to protect. (Take Sun for example - the company didn't need to horde a software business, so it has gone GPL or close on most things. Novell has its proprietary business to protect, so it's hybrid. Etc.)

I agree with Joel, saying everything is going to be one business model is just silly. Also since the business model you have proposing has a very long way to go to prove that it can actually be replicated across a wide spectrum of companies. Red Hat and MySQL are great examples of the 'pure-play' open source but we have a long way to go to prove that it can be replicated across a wide spectrum of markets. At the same time, it doesn't seem like too many commercial vendors are packing up their bags.

The future for open source is definitely bright but the future is a mixture of business models and that is a good thing.