Cobalt Acquisition Good For Open Source Community?

kirwin writes: "InfoWorld offers some insight to the possible rewards that the Open Source community could reap, thanks to the Sun's acquisition of Cobalt Networks." I'm still not sure how I feel about this one. I'm gonna adopt ye old wait-and-see before I let it bug me.

Comments

Re:Probably neutral

[Kaa]

Look, folks, they would not be Open-Sourcing a $70M+ product (StarOffice) if they didn't want the community buy-in.

Ahem. And what else could they do with StarOffice? Sell it? I don't think so. It's buggy, bloated, tries to pretend it's the only application you'll ever need (tm), and is generally full of cruft. It cannot compete with MS Office. It's actually not even in the same league.

Sun is an old-style company trying to find its way into this new world.

Er... Sun is Microsoft with smaller teeth. If it manages to kick Microsoft's teeth in (with the help of DoJ or otherwise), it'll become the biggest fish in the pond. That's the only thing, other than money, that it's interested in. And, yes, since it's a big corporation this is as it should be.

Basically, Sun is practicing diplomacy towards OpenSource, where diplomacy is defined as "saying 'nice doggie' until you can find a stick".

Kaa