Why isn’t the “Open Core” model legitimately 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.

kennejima:

Like many people already doing so, I’ve been digging into Redis and other NoSQL products.

Unlike all those anti-SQL fanboys, I have 15+ years of experience in RDBMS, and I know the relational algebra has a lot more mathematical implications in practice than the CAP theorem, not to mention the…