Leave Virginia Alone: On Open-source and Proprietary Threats

“While it used to be that the term “open source”
conjured up socially lost Linux cave-dwellers, in recent years,
open source has gone decidedly mainstream. Even if you don’t
partake in dedicated offerings such as Firefox, Chrome, Adium or
Android, there are probably open-source components in much of the
software that you do use. But while the number of open
source-focused startups is on the rise, proprietary software
players are also increasingly acquiring open-source companies, and
in the process, altering the courses of important platforms and
applications. These aren’t necessarily good trends.

“Matt Asay recently predicted that this year would usher in lots
of acquisitions of small cloud computing players by big software
companies, specifically citing open-source players such as Cloudera
(which supports the ever more popular Hadoop, an open-source query
platform) as potential targets. Meanwhile big-ticket acquisitions
of open source-focused companies have proliferated…”

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