Interesting developments keep happening in the Open Source world. "Oracle's Open-Source Shopping Spree" says that Oracle is negotiating to purchase the JBoss Group (JBoss Application Server), Zend (PHP), and Sleepy Cat (database). The acquisition is already announced on the Sleepy Cat page.

This follows news that Oracle purchased InnoDB, the company behind a key piece of technology for the MySQL database (InnoDB technology adds transaction support to MySQL, a feature that my friends that know more than I do about databases say is what elevates MySQL above toy status). Could this be Oracle's way of forcing MySQL's technology hand? Realistically, MySQL should now focus on adding the InnoDB functionality natively.

2 database technologies, both from the C world, a Java-based middleware suite, and a non-Java web framework technology. Somewhat strange bedfellows. Both PHP and JBoss can be made to work with the "C world" databases so that's not a real stretch (other, but the PHP world and Java aren't common bedfellows. There are attempts going on to bring them closer together, but as far as I can tell, there isn't anything exciting happening in that realm just yet. Maybe they picked based on name recognition in those 3 different areas. I guess we'll wait and see how Oracle plans to tie all of this together or if they are just spreading the wealth.

Speaking of strange bedfellows, this also presents some strange business relationships as well. Novell has picked JBoss as a core component of their stack support in SUSE Linux (Red Hat went with Jonas. Even more interesting is the recent partnership announcement between JBoss and Microsoft.

How will the community handle big companies gobbling up smaller OSS project parents? With JBoss havin has kept a stable of the most important developers so losing some external community support is probably not a big deal. I'm sure Oracle can throw a few hundred people on it anyway. Will communities rebel against the leadership (e.g. Mambo)? Will we start seeing project forks?

What remains to be seen is what would happen when Oracle's priorities shift. Would they drop providing resources to these projects? Would they then whither and die or have a new champion take up the cause?

The important moral of this story is… OSS is a major factor now and isn't going away. The big companies are starting to pay attention. If you can't beat them, join them.

UPDATE: This News.com article says Oracle tried to buy MySQL but Marten Mickos was having none of it. Very interesting. If you can't beat them, buy them?

As I was looking over the keynote speakers for the OSBC conference next week, I was reminded once again of an interesting dichotomy in the open source community. The Who's Who of Open Source is often radically different depending on if you are looking at it from the business perspective or from the developer perspective. Sure, you have some of the really big names that will be known across the board such as Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond, etc. But these are really some of the early pioneers that really launched the whole OSS ship. How many higher ups in companies are throwing around names like James Duncan Davidson, Craig McClanahan, James Strachan, Erik Hatcher, Jason Hunter, etc? How many OSS developers and users are waiting for the next revelation from… well pick an OSBC keynote speaker.

OSS doesn't have a monopoly on this dichotomy (I've seen this sort of thing in many industries) but the OSS field seems particularly divided in this regard, especially considering the fact that OSS is an industry cross-cutter.

I think this just underscores the fact that we need more cross boundary communication in both camps. Business decision makers would be much more comfortable with the adoption of OSS if they understood the nature of the community and the software. OSS projects could improve adoption rate if they truly understood the factors that make businesses nervous.