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Is Getting Acquired Good For FOSS Projects?

Posted by samzenpus on from the big-fish-eats-little-fish dept.

ruphus13 writes "While open source companies are legion, their acquisitions by proprietary source companies may cause concern for the viability of projects. Can a FOSS project 'survive' an acquisition? According to the article posing that question: 'One has to ask, though, how healthy it is for increasingly important open-source platforms and applications to come under the wing of huge, proprietary software companies. Probably the best example to cite on that topic is the ongoing car crash that is Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems...Sun Micrososytems is one of only three big, US public companies focused almost entirely on open source. If it gets swallowed up, that will leave just Red Hat and Novell. Open-source pundits are predicting that small, promising open-source players will be snapped up by bigger fish this year. And Google's relationship to Android gets ever murkier as it sinks its commercial hooks deeper into the platform, billing its own offerings as superphones relative to other Android phones.'"

4 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. What does "Acquire" mean? by xquark · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How does a firm "acquire" an OSS project? Look at mysql, All Sun did was pay money for a name, bunch of workers and a customer list, not the actual IP, cause that was open sourced to begin with.

    In short, if a company "acquires" (whatever that means in this context) an OSS project, and you're not happy with how things are being done, fork the project and be on your way, Otherwise learn to drink the coolade like everyone else.

    --
    Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
    1. Re:What does "Acquire" mean? by mysidia · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Indeed... not only would there be a fork, but Oracle's version would probably be obsolete soon.

      And since the fork would have code not owned by Oracle, they would no longer be able to sell commercial licenses to the GPL'ed product, or pick up the enhancements, without giving up on proprietary versions and commercial licenses, forever...

  2. I wouldn't mind... by IANAAC · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I wouldn't mind seeing MySQL die.

    Well, I shouldn't say die. I *DO* wish that it'd conform a bit more with the SQL standard though.

    Now donning my flame-retardant suit.

  3. Re:QT and Nokia by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I suppose it is generally good for an OSS product to be acquired by a natural consumer of the product, but not by a competitor.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au