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A New Model: Open Source Software After It's Acquired (InformationWeek)
Here's a
lengthy InformationWeek article on corporations and their management of
(and acquisition of) open source projects. "Over the past 24 months,
a premium has been placed on open source code, as it moved from the
backwater of the enterprise to the mainstream. In the process, open source
has become big business. The idea: Develop open source code quickly; make
it available for free download in hopes of winning early market momentum;
rake in some technical support revenues as the code develops an enterprise
following; and cash in via an acquisition by a deep-pocketed
vendor."
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A New Model: Open Source Software After It's Acquired (InformationWeek) Posted Sep 13, 2008 3:32 UTC (Sat) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] I dunno... One glance at the verb "acquired" and I was imagining some huge, evil corporate monstrosity that gobbles up everything in sight. And sure enough, in the second paragraph is mention of Sun's "Open-Source" arm OpenSolaris, and its recently-departed (on seemingly acrimonious terms) open-source advisory board member Roy Fielding. Disclosure: I didn't read past the 4th (or so) paragraph--this article is too lengthy. ;-)
A New Model: Open Source Software After It's Acquired (InformationWeek) Posted Sep 14, 2008 17:37 UTC (Sun) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]
Uh, waitaminute, what does corporate acquisition have to do with OpenSolaris? That wasn't an acquisition, it was the company that originally developed the source code open sourcing it.
Sun did make a major open source acquisition in MySQL. I don't recall any other open source acquisitions by Sun off the top of my head, although I wouldn't be surprised if I'm forgetting some. Um... Oh yeah! VirtualBox.
On the other hand I can easily name a few important open source releases from Sun: OpenOffice (they acquired the closed-source StarOffice and open-sourced it, if I recall correctly), Java, ZFS.
Disclaimer: I haven't read the article at all -- I just read pr1268's comment. ;-)
A New Model: Open Source Software After It's Acquired (InformationWeek) Posted Sep 14, 2008 17:55 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] I don't recall any other open source acquisitions by Sun off the top of my head, although I wouldn't be surprised if I'm forgetting some. StarDivision GmbH for their StarOffice software, which Sun then open-sourced (OpenOffice).
A New Model: Open Source Software After It's Acquired (InformationWeek) Posted Sep 14, 2008 15:01 UTC (Sun) by TRS-80 (subscriber, #1804) [Link] The article and sidebar are strangely upbeat on Xen's prospects, despite it being stuck on 2.6.18 and hence its likely dropping from Debian lenny, never being supported in Ubuntu, XenPvOps not being ready in time for Fedora 10 and Redhat buying the developers of KVM.
Xen is dead Posted Sep 15, 2008 9:35 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] It's like Pentium4 in 2004: it was widely used, it still had few important milestones ahead (first dual-core from Intel were Pentium4-based), but the whole architecture was doomed. The same is true for Xen: it'll be supported in the future for existing clients, but it has no future - and Microsoft's involvement guarantees that. Even if had sense from technical viewpoint (and it does not) few are ready to accept something from Microsoft (or it's allies): think Mono and Moonlight. I do not think Silverlight and Moonlight are bad pieces of technology - but I sure as hell hope they'll fail since I do not want yet another piece of my desktop to be controlled by some proprietary-minded company. I have enough problems with Flash - and it's not as essentional to todays Web as Silverlight will be in Microsoft's vision...
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