"So, now that the dust is starting to settle from the news that Sun is buying MySQL for a staggering $1 billion pricetag, let's take a look at the larger picture-- how is consolidation going to affect the open source ecosystem? MySQL was the first project in 2008 to be absorbed this way, but it certainly won't be the last.
"The trend is clearly towards single-project open source plays being snapped up by larger players like Sun, Red Hat, Novell, and so forth. If you look at any company that's backing a single open source project, the odds seem to be that it will either fail, or eventually be bought by a company that sees the project as an asset to its overall strategy..."
