Open Source Weblog

Oracle's potential purchase of JBoss, he notes, can be seen as a move against BEA, which has made its own moves to open source previously proprietary work to protect its position against JBoss.

As the impact of open source success in the Java middleware market continues to ripple through the sector, open source developers can simply sit back and reap the rewards of more open source code and the availability of professional (commercial) support. It's the same ripple effect that prompted IBM to acquire Gluecode and release its WebSphere Community Edition.

It is interesting to note Microsoft's Bill Hilf talking about the 'ripple effect' that Microsoft sees itself causing in the open source industry and that 'perception' is a challenge for the software giant in the open source debate.

While Hilf was brought in to Microsoft to provide some open source experience, his comments highlight the importance of perspective. Is Microsoft causing a ripple in the open source software market, or is open source software causing a ripple in the proprietary software market, which is dominated by Microsoft?

Meanwhile, Astaro's vice president of marketing, Alex Neihaus, makes an interesting comment in follow up to my post on VC funding.

"What I think is the real result of all this spend: a massive transference of intellectual property into the public domain," he notes. "…just consider the idea that all this VC funding is like a government building new toll-free roads, bridges and tunnels. Could this just be one of those perfect capitalist synchronicities in which the guiding hand reaching for profit improves the (technology) world for everyone?"

While I'm not sure about the government analogy (depending on your cultural and political viewpoint government could be said to have a level of obligation to provide 'toll-free' public services) it is interesting to note that while the capitalist VC firms search for profits from commercial open source vendors, open source developers are once again able to sit back and reap the rewards.

Finally, it seems MySQL has already spent a little of the $18.5m it raised earlier this month, snapping up Netfrastructure. It might not be a name you've heard of, but is the company set up by Jim Starkey, the creator of the InterBase database, which forked into the Firebird project.

Starkey discusses his reasons for joining MySQL here.