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Open Season On Open Source?
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece looking at the possible future of open source. The article's conclusion is that it might be grim. From the piece: 'Software giant Oracle Corp. has acquired two small open-source companies and is in negotiations to buy at least one more. Many experts believe this is the beginning of a broader trend in which established tech companies scoop up promising open-source startups. While the validation is thrilling it's also unsettling. Many young idealists who set out to create an alternative to the tech Establishment now find themselves becoming part of it.'"
Plagiarised without attribution from:l .3.178798.34
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joe
That is a sad story. That is definately not what Open Source is about. Unfortunately it is a result of you deciding to select Redhat as your first Linux Distrobution. Redhat is really an enterprise version of Linux that I would only recommend to medium-large businesses that want the reassurance of having a supported version of Linux.
If you want an easy to use, polished Linux Distrobution that *Just Works out of the box* with a thriving community I recommend that you try Ubuntu Linux (http://www.ubuntu.com/). You will like the Ubuntu difference (http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu):
"Ubuntu is Free Software, and available to you free of charge. It's also Free in the sense of giving you rights of Software Freedom, but you probably knew that already! Unlike many of the other commercial distributions in the free and open source world (Libranet, Lindows, Xandros, Red Hat) the Ubuntu team really does believe that Free software should be free of software licencing charges."
In fact they will even send you a copy free of charge (they will even pay for postage):
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
You can safely use/deploy Ubuntu knowing that you will never be caught in an expensive update cycle. Ubuntu is tailored for the Desktop and as a result offers a superior Desktop experience than 'Redhat Enterprise Linux' which is more tailored for servers anyway.
Also you will always be able to get Firefox from the firefox website (http://www.getfirefox.com/ absolutely free of charge (although they do welcome donations). Firefox strives to be a free, standards compliant web browser that aims to work on many different platforms (i.e. ensuring that you don't have to buy Windows in order to surf the Internet).
A company can buy the copyright for the source and re-release it under a different license. As long as the copyright is theirs, they can do whatever they want to do with it, except for suing anyone using a copy of the source BEFORE it was bought out (and its forks). So, a project may be forked and it will be perfectly legal.
But what if for example Sun stops releasing OpenOffice under LGPL? Something like 70% of the OpenOffice team are Sun employees. And although OpenOffice is not such a mess as the MSDOC format, it's often regarded as being difficult to mantain. Because of that, it would be easier and more appealing for many developers to put more effort in projects such as KOffice and Abiword/Gnumeric rather than forking OpenOffice.