[ Thanks to Glyn
Moody for this link. ]
“Companies based around open source are still
comparatively young. So it remains an open question what happens to
them in the long term. As open source becomes more widely accepted,
an obvious growth path for them is to be bought by a bigger,
traditional software company. The concern then becomes: how does
the underlying open source code fare in those circumstances?“The first large-scale test-case was Sun buying MySQL. But that
experiment was soon curtailed – and trumped – when
Oracle bought Sun. Naturally, this prompted much hand-wringing over
whether Oracle would nurture the open source projects that Sun was
running – and whether it was even capable of understanding
the free software culture. That was over a year ago, so it’s maybe
time to see how things are working out.“As far as Oracle is concerned, everything is going
swimmingly:“Oracle Corporation today announced fiscal 2010 Q4 GAAP total
revenues were up 39% to $9.5 billion, while non-GAAP total revenues
were up 40% to $9.6 billion.”