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.'"
What does "Acquire" mean? (Score:5, 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.
Re:What does "Acquire" mean? (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps they could, but aren't examples like the kernel, mysql etc proof that open source endeavors are just as capable in providing "proprietary quality" products as closed houses are.
Oracle may go and provide some special feature in their closed version of mysql, but I doubt it would be long before a forked version (prior to acquisition) has pretty much the same capability. Freely available replicas of proprietary functionalities is one of the major underpinnings of open source, less so innovation - unfortunately
I wouldn't mind... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:No. (Score:2, Interesting)
"Open source" is a trademark of OSI, who fortunately are not evil AFAICT.
No, it's not. According to their own page [opensource.org] their trademarks are for OSI, Open Source Initiative and the OSI logo. If you don't believe me here's the quote:
OSI, Open Source Initiative, and OSI logo ("OSI Logo"), either separately or in combination, are hereinafter referred to as "OSI Trademarks" and are trademarks of the Open Source Initiative.
Re:No. (Score:2, Interesting)
And if that's not enough here is this [usrbinruby.net] page from Eric S. Raymond himself:
We have discovered that there is virtually no chance that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would register the mark "open source"; the mark is too descriptive. Ironically, we were partly a victim of our own success in bringing the "open source" concept into the mainstream.
Re:please tell us your real agenda. (Score:0, Interesting)
Right, because big companies are famous for the reliable support they provide and their responsiveness to customer demands. Seriously, have you ever tried to get actual customer support from a large company?
As opposed to going with an OSS project and getting your bug reports closed and constantly marked as WONTFIX? But to answer your question, yes I have personally and so has my company.
Re:please tell us your real agenda. (Score:3, Interesting)
your assertion about individuals losing responsibility is true, but it only applies 100% to government, since big business will tank if they lose enough credability with their customers, were public servants are basicly impossible to fire and government can't go out of business.
Yes the wheels DO turn a little slower in larger companies, but it's better then the wheels not turning at all as happens when the OSS project your business was relying on goes dark because the main dev lost interest.
if you look behind the scenes corp. money is what is driving all the major projects, its not a bad thing.
Re:QT and Nokia (Score:4, 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.
Re:If by "good" you mean (Score:0, Interesting)
If it gives the original project owners vast wealth, freeing up their time spent doing day jobs to work completely on their open source forked version then sure, why not.
Re:What does "Acquire" mean? (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...
Re:What does "Acquire" mean? (Score:1, Interesting)
The original owner made it difficult for vendors to package MySQL as part of a proprietary solution without negotiating a commercial license from MySQL AB. I suspect that was worth much more than training. After all, anyone can start a training company and undercut MySQL's (Sun's (Oracle's))) rates by a few hundred bucks.