This morning I sat in on two open source and business oriented talks — first was “What happens when the money comes?“, a panel discussion with heavy weights Danese Cooper and Tim O’Reilly, among others. The panel discussed what happens to open source projects when existing corporations come in and acquire successful open source projects. The recent acquisition of JBoss by RedHat fueled the creation of this panel discussion.

I find panel discussions hard to blog — the exchanges between panelists are quick and often without much structure. But I feel that the discussion had a few interesting anecdotes that I’d like to share with you. Mind you, I won’t try and cover all the bits of the panel discussion — I’ll pick and a few points and discuss them a little further.

Tim O’Reilly shared an anecdote from the old X11 consortium where many corporate interests were represented. People at the consortium meetings would state things like: “Digital feels that …”, “IBM believes that…” — the people present would be pushing the corporate line that their bosses told them to deliver. One person said: “So and so believes that XYX… No wait! I don’t believe that — that would be a terrible decision”.

The conflict between individuals thinking about technical aspects will collide with the business beliefs held by corporations — it is inevitable. This conflict will arise more now that corporations are increasingly acquiring open source projects. The culture of the community and the culture of the acquiring corporation were both created from different motivations. Marrying those two cultures inevitably leads to clashes between the community and the corporation.

Anticipating these conflicts and taking the developer community’s concerns into account can help smooth the transition. For instance, will developers that go to work for the company be able to continue working once they decide to leave the company? Who will be allowed to commit code to the project with the new rulers? Will the copyrights to community contributions need to be assigned to the company?

Mitchell Baker talked about her experiences with the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation and the tension that existed between her/the Mozilla team and AOL corporate. The goals and views of AOL were drastically different from the goals of the open source community and these differences provided for an endless source of friction.

When AOL came around to laying off many of the Mozilla team members she said: “They laid me off, but didn’t expect me to not stop doing what I was doing.” For the next year she continued to work half time on Mozilla project — unpaid. When the Mozilla project was finally set free from AOL, she likened the experience of being spun out from AOL/Netscape to being spat out.

This scenario exemplifies the differing opinions between a corporate mentality and the open source mentality. Today the situation looks quite different — Mozilla Corporation (which is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation) has become a company with annual revenues of multiple millions of dollars. Mozilla now stands firm on its own where the open source mentality drives the corporate mentality. When the money comes from your own customers you have much more control than when you the money comes from a corporate parent.

Other more subtle conflict points exist — Tim O’Reilly shared the story he fears was the worst thing he ever did for the open source community: Hiring Larry Wall to work on perl full time. Larry was given carte blanche to spend his time working on perl. Tim asserts that this removed Larry from reality pressures of his day job which gave Larry a lot of motivation. His day job presented Larry with a number of frustrations that motivated him to write perl to tackle these tasks during his day job.

All of these points are things to consider when hitching an open source project to a corporate bandwagon. None of these issues have easy solutions and will always depend on the nature of the project.

Wrapping things up Danese asked the panelists what they believe the future holds for OSS and corporate acquisitions. Susie from Zend/Apache shared that two-thirds of all acquisitions/mergers fail and given that, we should expect two thirds of open source acquisitions/merges to fail as well. Ugh — that is a grim thought, since I doubt that these open source communities around these projects can withstand the failure of an acquisition. That’s certainly an ugly thought.

Tim’s parting thought compared open source projects to humans — projects that were hot 10 years ago have become boring and conservative. People grow old and conservative in age and so do open source projects. Some great projects of the past should be let go as we focus on projects that are hot today.

I enjoyed listening to the anecdotes shared by the panelists. It outlines a number of problems that the F/OSS communities need to address before a more harmonic relationship with corporate entities can be developed. Personally I favor Mozilla’s approach: Build companies on open source ideals and avoid the clash with the evil corporate overlords.