Microsoft Planning to Buy Open Source Companies?

mjasay writes "At the Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted that Microsoft 'will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products,' suggesting that to avoid open-source companies would 'take us out of the acquisition market quite dramatically.' Ballmer has apparently come a long way since dubbing Linux a 'cancer.' The real question, however, is which open-source companies make sense within the Microsoft product portfolio, both from a technology and philosophy perspective. Novell? 37Signals? Jive? SugarCRM? And, equally importantly, which companies could look their communities in the eye after selling to Microsoft?"

Microsoft SuSE?

[Nicholas Evans]

And, equally importantly, which companies could look their communities in the eye after selling to Microsoft?

Novell has already sold their soul and they're still staring people down. Guess this should be taken as an announcement that we'll soon be dealing with Microsoft SuSE.

Re:Microsoft SuSE?

[bconway]

Keep in mind, Novell sales are up 250% [computerworld.com] since their deal with Microsoft. Their customers don't exactly seem to mind.

Re:Through Money tinted glasses

[MobyDisk]

Absolutely! They could even sell their copyrights to Microsoft, and continue development on an open-source fork if they wanted. Heck, Microsoft might even decide to leave the application open source. I think it would all prove to be a very interesting experiment, to see if buying the company was really good for Microsoft, and to see if the community continued development of the product, and which ways the forks went. Quite interesting!

Also note that this isn't really a "threat" to the community because large-scale OSS projects have copyrights owned by a myriad of people, so they really can't be sold. It only applies to companies that develop completely in-house, or require contributors to sign-away their copyrights.

Related note: I work for a company that uses SugarCRM internally, and has modified it (very slightly) for our purposes. SugarCRM would become useless if we didn't have the source.

Re:Through Money tinted glasses

[Capt James McCarthy]

"ALL OF THEM."

Agreed. Business is business. Just because M$ owns an OS based company doesn't make the code closed.

The bigger issue is if M$ ends up buying all the cards in the game, and starts to sprinkle proprietary code into the OS code what happens to the OS code then?

Submitter barking up the wrong tree

[Anonymous Coward]

They mention Novell as a possibility... followed by a bunch of half-assed web production houses with no actual value. Think more like MySQL AB or other pieces of real software that people are choosing over MS products. Nobody gives a shit about Jive.

Re:Through Money tinted glasses

[Triddle]

One word: SysInternals.

They were open source, and they sold up to MS. Now their code is being slowly neutered. In another year or two their really useful utilities (FileMon, RegMon, et al) will either be history or blind to accesses to 'sensitive' information.

The /. Borg icon is right on the money...

Re:37Signals!

[drix]

Too many buttons [37signals.com], indeed.

It'll be a cold day in hell before they sell that company to MS.

Re:Through Money tinted glasses

[Bonzodog01]

There is a quote somewhere from Bill Gates - I do not remember where I saw it, but he more or less said that he saw Open Source as the absolute future of software development. He admitted that Closed source was not going to work much longer, and that Microsoft would be looking in the Open Source direction for development. This potentially means that one day, we could even see an Open Source MS Office suite, which would be cool, as it could then possibly be ported to run natively in Linux.

Most likely OSS companies with patents

[Dcnjoe60]

Instead of buying OSS companies to kill them off, most likely Microsoft would be looking for OSS companies with patents that have been used by other OSS projects, particularly Linux. Once Microsoft owns the company, it can enforce the patent. Forking won't help with a patent violation, particularly if the patent is question is in use by other projects.

Wait, wait, wait...

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Microsoft may be many things, but stupid is not one of them. I would bet substaintal sums of money that the staff will have signed non-competes keeping them from working on any non-MS fork (and maybe any other OSS as well). Actually, umpteen gazillion dollars may not be a bad price to take out the various project leaders. Let us be honest, without good managment familiar with the source, large-scale OSS projects are impossible. And a rapid decapitation may take years to recover from.

thank you Microsoft!

[m2943]

This is great news. Microsoft will give hundreds of millions of dollars to the founders of open source companies, and the software itself will remain open source. This kind of monetary reward can only encourage the development of more open source software. Thank You Microsoft!

Re:Evolution of strategy

[rbanffy]

"They cannot compete effectively with open source so they are going to buy as many open source companies as they can and Shut Them Down"

The beauty is in imagining how much of the money they pay for such companies will get funneled back into FOSS projects. It could represent an impressive boost mainly because projects and companies cooperate between them, something MS is unable to do.

Their best shot is to try to own as much intellectual property as possible and that will only take them as far as US-like software patents do exist. These movements are mainly intended to reduce the momentum behind FOSS thus complementing their FUD strategies.

They will kick, they will scream, but they sure look doomed to me. It's only a matter of time now.