Random Musings from Randal

What is most important to understand about an Open Core project is that it has nothing to do with an open source project. If you are depending on a single closed source component then you have to regard the whole project as a closed source project as you lose all the benefits of open source:

• You are depending on one vendor.
• You can’t do any bug fixes yourself and you can’t contract anyone except the original vendor to get things fixed.
• You can’t examine and improve the product (not any part of if).
• You can’t use any open source or commercial extensions from anyone else. This is true also for any plugins that access any internal parts of the product (which is true for most MySQL plugins).
• You are limited to the platforms that the original vendors makes available. (In MySQL’s case you can’t for example use the new commercial features on RedHat 6 as it’s not a supported platform).
• The builds you are using are not tested anymore by millions of users (more bugs).
• The product is not checked by the open source community for security problems or back doors.
• The new features will not be adopted by (and may even cause conflicts with) other open source projects.
• You are subject to one vendor’s price politics which they can change at their convenience.