Open-source software, which by its traditional definition is developed collaboratively by informal groups and available free to anyone, has been a major factor driving the growth of the internet, and especially the proliferation of blogs and small websites.

My company, NewWest.Net, and countless others would be nowhere without what's known inelegantly as the LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PhP. They are, respectively, an operating system, a web server, a database and a programming language. They are all very powerful, open-source solutions that generally cost nothing.

Given that, two big software deals announced last week are, on the face of it, a bit puzzling, and perhaps alarming. The Swedish company that's behind MySQL was bought by Sun Microsystems for $1 billion, and the British company behind another piece of excellent open-source software that we use, OpenAds, received a $15 million round of funding.

There is certainly plenty of precedent for open-source software going commercial: Red Hat was formed in the late 1990s to commercialise Linux, and in fact our servers run on a version of Red Hat Linux. The general concept is that the software remains free, but you pay for a commercial version in order to get support, updates, and some assurance that you're not at the mercy of an anonymous group of web developers scattered around the globe.

Sun, and the venture capitalists behind OpenAds, undoubtedly have something similar in mind. The basic code will still be freely available, but if you want more of a ‘product’ that comes with the things we generally expect from a product, or an enterprise version with lots of bells and whistles, you'll have to pay for it. Sun could in principle use MySQL as a loss leader for its hardware, bundling an optimised version with its servers and workstations, for example.

Even "productised" open-source software is much cheaper than proprietary products from Microsoft or Oracle or other vendors. Commercial software that does more or less the same thing as its LAMP counterpart can cost tens of thousands of dollars; if we'd had to buy an Oracle database to launch NewWest.Net, we might never have got off the ground.

In light of the importance of cheap software for small web businesses, however, these two deals do make me slightly nervous. On the one hand, they could result in better products that will still be quite cheap, if not free, and that would be a good thing. And completely free open-source versions will presumably continue to exist: the core code, after all, is still in the public domain.

But there is some risk that these products will, over time, evolve into expensive proprietary products that are quite different from the original open-source versions, and that could present problems for companies like ours. If we couldn't afford the commercial version, the alterative might be a buggy open-source version that was less compatible with the web software ecosystem.

One prominent industry commentator, John Dvorak, even suggests that the Sun/ MySQL deal is part of a conspiracy with Oracle to kill MySQL, which takes a lot of sales away from Oracle. That seems a little over the top to me, but still.

Don't get my wrong: it's not that I think we're entitled to free software, and in fact we do pay for all sorts of commercial software. I'm just very cognisant of the tangible and substantial benefits that the open-source software movement has yielded for me and my company and many others like us. I'd hate to see that disappear.

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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