Is Getting Acquired Good For FOSS Projects? 131
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.'"
Re:"legion" (Score:1, Informative)
It means there are many of them. I'm sorry you're not more widely read, but this is a common English expression.
Re:"legion" (Score:1, Informative)
English, m-f, do you speak it?
"As long as single one of us stands, we are legion." - Kain
Re:No. (Score:3, Informative)
Viewing of source is necessary but insufficient: An OSS project/license must satisfy OSI's criteria (identical to Debian free software guidelines). "Open source" is a trademark of OSI, who fortunately are not evil AFAICT.
Xen and Amanda (Score:3, Informative)
Other projects include Xen virtual software (where the parent company, Xensource, was bought by Citrix.) It was very exciting for a while there, but I'm seeing the leading edge Linux users turn to KVM and the corporate users stick with VMWare, not realizing the problems of the server hardware and VMWare's ancient 2.4 kernel. I'm not sure why: I've not had the opportunity to do side-by-side comparisons with the latest versions of all of them.
The Amanda backup software has been taken up by Zmanda, who have apparently destabilized it in the midst of trying to add glitzy GUI's to it which they sell only as corporate add-ons and which have caused two companies I know to throw it out, not because the Amanda was not fast and functional, but because the admins handed the backup management couldn't figure out the GUI and configure things properly.