NetGraft

Open source is about bringing control back to the users. Even if you yourself never look at the code, you have benefitted from open development and massive peer review. You are free from the mercy of a single vendor who has its own best interests in mind. Open source succeeds by its merits, not by the any one company's talented marketing department.

If you're a proprietary software vendor, how do you respond? Your lucrative business model is at stake. Your customers no longer have to be miserable. How can you compete? You can try to make a superior product. This effectively means that you have to go open source. Many vendors have done this already. You can't beat a global community of open source developers, so the next best thing is to join them. IBM is one shining example.

If you must keep your systems proprietary, open source is a threat to you. It's impossible to compete on pure technical grounds, so what can you do? Spread Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. This is so common that it's better known by the acronym "FUD".

I made this document for anti-FUD purposes.I would also like to thank those who have already shared their stories. The response from the MySQL community has been very humbling.