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Microsoft Planning to Buy Open Source Companies?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the dabbling-in-everything dept.

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?"

4 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft SuSE? by Nicholas+Evans · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And, equally importantly, which companies could look their communities in the eye after selling to Microsoft?
    Novell has already sold their soul and they're still staring people down. Guess this should be taken as an announcement that we'll soon be dealing with Microsoft SuSE.
    --
    The Yasashii Syndicate ||
    1. Re:Microsoft SuSE? by bconway · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Keep in mind, Novell sales are up 250% since their deal with Microsoft. Their customers don't exactly seem to mind.

      --
      Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
  2. Re:Through Money tinted glasses by MobyDisk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Absolutely! They could even sell their copyrights to Microsoft, and continue development on an open-source fork if they wanted. Heck, Microsoft might even decide to leave the application open source. I think it would all prove to be a very interesting experiment, to see if buying the company was really good for Microsoft, and to see if the community continued development of the product, and which ways the forks went. Quite interesting!

    Also note that this isn't really a "threat" to the community because large-scale OSS projects have copyrights owned by a myriad of people, so they really can't be sold. It only applies to companies that develop completely in-house, or require contributors to sign-away their copyrights.

    Related note: I work for a company that uses SugarCRM internally, and has modified it (very slightly) for our purposes. SugarCRM would become useless if we didn't have the source.

  3. thank you Microsoft! by m2943 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is great news. Microsoft will give hundreds of millions of dollars to the founders of open source companies, and the software itself will remain open source. This kind of monetary reward can only encourage the development of more open source software. Thank You Microsoft!