“In the early days of companies based around open source, the
questions were: would they make any money? Would they survive? Once
it was clear that they not only could survive, but also make money
quite nicely, the next question became: what happens when they
become successful enough to get bought by traditional software
companies?“We’ve been finding out. Oracle’s purchase of Sun has led to
open source projects being abandoned, others being forked and suits
alleging infringement of patents being filed. More recently, we’ve
had the saga of Attachmate’s purchase of Novell.”