Microsoft Planning to Buy Open Source Companies?

mjasay writes "At the Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted that Microsoft 'will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products,' suggesting that to avoid open-source companies would 'take us out of the acquisition market quite dramatically.' Ballmer has apparently come a long way since dubbing Linux a 'cancer.' The real question, however, is which open-source companies make sense within the Microsoft product portfolio, both from a technology and philosophy perspective. Novell? 37Signals? Jive? SugarCRM? And, equally importantly, which companies could look their communities in the eye after selling to Microsoft?"

Comments

Probably buy and extinguish.

[miffo.swe]

The only reason i could think of is to buy some companies and extinguish them.

Re:loyality

[AceJohnny]

What i want to know is, will they change the license of the software after purchase?

Well, sure, most probably: it's what Microsoft Does(tm). However, it won't change anything for versions previously released under real open-source licenses. It's called a "fork".

However, will users follow microsoft's versions, or the free forked versions? That's the interesting question that only time will tell.

Re:Through Money tinted glasses

[Anonymous Coward]

They are under no obligation to link to the modifications as the application is used INTERNALLY.

Great American Streetcar Scandal; 1936-50

[Hasai]

This is not a new strategy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

Vivendi Universal bought-up mp3.com and bulldozed it, Microsoft bought-up RAV AntiVirus and buried it. Now, M$ will probably do the same with these others; buy-up the businesses and turn them into parking lots.

Re:Through Money tinted glasses

[Red Flayer]

Both Novel and RedHat are publicly traded companies, which means by law they hold their investor's interests above all else.

False. Completely false, but often misconstrued as the truth wrt public companies.

The truth is that companies must adhere to their mission statements or they face the possibility of a civil tort.

Yes, most mission statements include maximization of profit or somesuch, but it's mistaken (very mistaken) to believe that public companies can only take actions that are intended to maximize shareholder profits.

Re:Through Money tinted glasses

[j-pimp]

One word: SysInternals.

They were open source, and they sold up to MS. Now their code is being slowly neutered. In another year or two their really useful utilities (FileMon, RegMon, et al) will either be history or blind to accesses to 'sensitive' information.

The /. Borg icon is right on the money...

First of all they were never truly open source. They released the source code to their command line apps, but not the cool gui ones. Thats not to say the source code wasn't useful, but it was more of a learning tool than anything, and they were not fostering community development. Their apps continue to improve I'm not a full time windows admin so I haven't noticed any reduced functionality. Feel free to point out specific examples.

What we lost from sysinternals getting acquired was we no longer have an independent person dedicated to figuring out the internals of the windows kernel and core api. He lost editorial control of himself. We also lost the source to the command line utilities, but copies of it exist, so we lose potential new source code. We also lose the potential of Mark writing articles where he proves how to do odd things like run windows without lsass.exe.