The ultimate open source M&A "poison pill"
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Blog: Those who consider acquiring an open source company must be careful not to upset the associated open source community.  Is there such thing as a hostile takeover in open source?
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Sarbanes-Oxley is a powerful tool for the SEC. It could also be very helpful for corporate raiders.
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At work we're mostly an OSS shop.  Partly because I have a strong bias towards OSS but cost, reliability, security, etc are all leading factors.  For the last several months now I've been in an interesting position to prove the benefits of OSS in a real-world environment.  We've had to extend a number of OSS tools to fit into our production environment.  These are significant additions and non-trivial.  Open Source allows you to STAND on the shoulders of gods.  For example we've been having a problem with the Jakarta DBCP  connection pool.  It was running out of connections in highly threaded environments and is slow.  Certainly slower than would be necessary.  Long story short.  Last night  ...
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Was the Novell/Microsoft deal a worthwhile well-meaning effort between renegade open-source geeks at Microsoft and geeks at Novell that got derailed by salespeople and management, after which it was turned into a nightmare deal with the devil?  I raise this question because I know someone with ties to people at both Microsoft and Novell.  He has a credible story to tell about what really happened, and how much it differs from what we now know about the Novell/Microsoft deal.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get him to write up the history - yet.  While I continue to pester him, here's the short version, third hand.
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Blog: MySQL is relentlessly pushing its way toward an IPO, as BusinessWeek reports, which makes the entire open source ecosystem that much more valuable.
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Lessons from the lords of leveraged buyouts.
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Is open source becoming the dumping ground for no-longer-wanted software, sort of like a Salvation Army dropoff point for programs instead of old clothes?
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It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL.  Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion ??? helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash.  But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups. read more
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Some business software vendors are determined to steer their own ships in a sea of acquisitions.
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The dangers of software patents for free software have always been a hot issue.  But with the news that Red Hat and Novell are being sued for alleged patent infringement by IP Innovation, the matter has moved from theory into practice.  In fact, in the battle against software patents, it turns out that the open source world already has a rather powerful weapon in its armoury â even if it's one that few people know about. read more
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Red Hat Inc.'s woes this week raise the issue of whether IT investors are turning sour on open source. A somewhat disappointing forecast for the next quarter has investors fleeing, just as they have from the company's open-source rival, Novell Inc.
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The Motley Fool - Leverage buyouts (LBOs) -- in which management borrows large amounts of money to buy a company and take it private -- have traditionally been for brick-and-mortar companies. But with billions flowing into private equity firms, they're are now targeting software companies as well. The latest: the $1.3 billion LBO of enterprise software developer Intergraph (Nasdaq: INGR - News). However, given the deal's valuation, there may be more bidders coming to the table.
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Here's one surefire way to sandbag your portfolio.
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Ross Mayfield has an interesting take on the Lenovo/IBM deal and bringing open source to the desktop in his blog... I believe their commoditization strategy is more than hardware.
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Even as such open source software developers as Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) and OpenOffice.org wax enthusiastic concerning enterprise deployments of their respective Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Office alternatives, industry analysts are urging caution.
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Ziff Davis - The emergence of stacks of open-source infrastructure software will spawn new opportunities for companies to enter and succeed in the open-source space, according to a panel of experts at the Harvard Business School's annual Cyberposium conference.
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Like many, I was pretty shocked by the recent Microsoft-EU deal to settle the long-running investigation into interoperability issues.  This was not so much because of the way Microsoft has used every kind of delaying tactic it could before eventually agreeing (for the nth time) to try harder in the future.  My real dismay was provoked by the gap between appearance and reality â a chasm that I think bodes ill for the future of open source. read more