Herds of cats

[Alex Martelli]

Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:

> Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> writes:
> > Alex Martelli wrote:
> >> Not a bad point at all, although perhaps not entirely congruent to
> >> open
> >> source: hiring key developers has always been a possibility (net of
> >> non-compete agreements, but I'm told California doesn't like those).
> 
> California places pretty strict limits on non-compete agreements. I

Yep, this is roughly what I'd heard, and what I meant above.

> was at Ingres when their parent company - ASK - got bought by CA. CA
> required people choosing to leave the company to sign an agreement
> that included *their* standard non-compete clause before getting the
> separation cash. Enough people left that found this clause irritating
> that it got take to multiple lawyers. Every last one of them declared
> it unenforceable in CA.

Tx for the anecdote, which does appear to reinforce the point.  I assume
CA's non-compete clause was fine in NY (I'm guessing that's where their
lawyers would be) and they didn't consider the state differences...


> > The essential difference, it seems to me, is that buying the company
> > gets you control over the company's proprietary technologies, whereas
> > hiring the developer only gets you access to the development skills of
> > the people who've been involved open source developments.
> 
> But it's not at all clear which of these is the more desirable
> outcome.

Good point.  I guess the only real answer is, "it depends".  But because
of this SH's point should be rephrased as, "buying the company ONLY gets
you control", etc, to emphasize the paralellism.  Even where non-compete
agreements ARE enforced, by buying a company you're still not assured of
getting *access to the development skills* -- even if those developers
are forced to keep working for you, if they feel they're doing it under
duress because you're legally twisting their arm, it seems very unlikely
that you'll get much of anything USEFUL out of them (and I would be
astonished if strict non-compete agreements still applied if you FIRED a
developer, rather than the developer choosing to leave...).

> CA bought ASK to get control of Ingres, which their Unicenter
> product used as a database. The *entire* server software development
> group left, meaning CA had all the sources and technologies, but none
> of the talent that created them. We called this the $300 million
> source license.
> 
> CA pretty clearly got screwed on this deal. They have since
> open-sourced the Ingres product.

I'm not sure the two sentences in your last paragraphs are really as
causally connected as one might think;-).  After all, didn't SAP also
opensource their own DB (I believe they now have a partnership with
MySQL to try to commercialize it), although in different circumstances?

IOW, it seems to me that, apart from Oracle, nobody's making money on
databases any more (I believe Microsoft is now giving away SQL Server
for free, although maybe not the largest "enterprise" edition and surely
not in open-source form -- of course, MS can afford a *lot* of money
losing ventures, because Windows and Office bankroll the entire company
to a highly "ca-ching" degree;-); so, companies whose money making
depends on applications sitting on top of the DB (true to some extent of
CA, to an even larger one of SAP) may opensource it both to (they hope)
get some free support for it AND to minimally undermine Oracle (who uses
its DB revenues to bankroll multipronged attacks and acquisitions into
the field of enterprise applications).

Still, I'm not disputing that CA "got screwed"... though it looks like
they did it to themselves -- they didn't stop to consider the need to
WOO developers to actually get them onboard as a part of the overall
deal, just sort of assumed they "came with the package"!-)  Bad people
management must be close to the #1 cause of failure of promising mergers
and acquisitions (and I'm not sure the qualifying part of this sentence,
after "failure", is needed;)...


Alex