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Is Getting Acquired Good For FOSS Projects?
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.'"
I've been struggling lately to understand why I should believe that Open Source projects are a good thing for a business that wants to profit, and also for a talented developer (such as myself) that wants to make some money in his career. From a company point of view, when you decide to market a product that's based on open source, it would seem that you're saying - my company isn't going to provide value based in software that any other company can't deliver. I see this as leading to products that rely on support contracts and a strong sales force in order to be profitable. Is this really a winning idea? What ever happened to the idea of building a product that is successful because it's simply better than the competition's product? I can't help but see open source as a path to mediocrity. Along the lines of the article - why would a large company buy a small company that has it's technology based in open source? What do you gain by paying for something that you already get for free? As a talented developer, I see open source as a bad thing - it reduces the value of a developer. Writing good software is hard - not a lot of people can do it. Again, why does a company want to pay for top notch developers when that same developer can contribute to it's products while someone else foots the bill? If an open source product is a companies bread and butter, and the strategy is to make money off of support contracts, well doesn't a developer just become more or less a bug fixer? In that world, if success is based upon who gives the best support, a developer is really support for support. I always thought I'd make a buck in this business because I consider myself a superior engineer, and I'd take that skill and use it to help a company create a product that other people don't have the skills to create. In short, I can't help but see open source as something that devalues software engineers. Tell me why I'm wrong. Explain why other professions don't go out of their way to make the product of their hard work 'free'.