The future of FOSS: A tale of database licensing says it all
You don't have to spend long in any aspect of IT to discover that databases are the soul of IT, its constant animating force. From one perspective, everything digital is a specialized database: word processors, spreadsheets, shoot-em-ups, streaming services, from Google to your disk filing system. The storing, sorting and retrieval of data? That's it. That's the whole game. It has been the case ever since Herman Hollerith designed the punched card tabulating machine in the late nineteenth century.
As for databases that call themselves that, they're the engine of corporate computing. Their capability, reliability and maintainability are essential, and the metrics of performance and expense are unambiguous. Corporate decisions about databases are one of the purest indicators of how IT is sourced and deployed. Hype is quickly exposed, as is the good stuff.
So when you look at the databases developers actually choose, you're seeing a market model with wider implications. Open source versus proprietary, hosted versus on-prem, innovation versus maturity: all primary concerns across IT, all crystallized in DB decisions.
But there's an equally important flip side: how the developers and suppliers of DB software manage to stay in business themselves. That's the other great question of IT in the 2020s: how do you make money either fighting or flaunting FOSS.
That's the first lesson from a feature discussing today's FOSS databases and their respective licensing terms: open source has won. It's about time too. Before FOSS was a corporate option, the big guys were ruthless at monetizing their position in the heart of IT.