How Consolidation Affects Open Source

“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…”

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