Update 10/5/09: The day after I wrote this blog and twittered it, the OpenProj committers provided the missing source code.

There has been lots of discussion about what will happen to MySQL once it is acquired by Oracle.  In a generic sense, the question really comes down to this:

What happens to an open source project, when the open source company that acquires it is bought by a proprietary software company.

I thought I would share an example, OpenProj, where an acquisition by Serena Software, a proprietary software company, has not boded well for the open source project.

OpenProj is an open source project management tool that was originally backed by a company called Projity.  Projity offered OpenProj under an open source license, and then sold an "On Demand" hosted version for a subscription fee.

About a year ago, Projity was bought by Serena Software.  Serena said that they would continue to offer OpenProj under an open source license, but would roll the On Demand functionality into another proprietary product — Serena Mariner.

So far so good.

However the committers on OpenProj seem to all be employees of Serena.  Although they continue to add patches to OpenProj, they no longer respond to any questions or issues on the forums or mailing lists.  They have posted nothing to the developer list in the last year. 

We recently were helping a customer to resolve an issue in OpenProj.  To change the code, we needed a particular file.  Unfortunately, the source code for that particular file was not available on the project site.  Only the binary for that file was available.  Source code for other files was available, but this one was missing.  We were apparently not the first ones to notice this, because someone had already posted a question to the mailing list with no response.  Our posts to find the missing source file as well as many attempts to reach out to project committers have been unsuccessful to date.

We're assuming that the lack of source code for this particular file was an oversight.  And, I'm guessing that the project committers are too busy on their Serena work to pay attention to the mailing lists.  However, by not responding to inquiries on this issue or resolving, OpenProj as it stands right now is not fully open source — since it doesn't meet the basic test of making source code available.  We're still working to try and get a response from the OpenProj committers (if anyone can help with this, let us know).

This issue raises a larger question though for open source users — what will happen to other open source projects when the sole company that backs them is bought by a proprietary company whose interests lie elsewhere?  This risk is especially high with projects that have a "closed" list of committers that work for a single vendor backing the project.  I'd be interested in hearing about other examples of similar acquisitions and what happened to the open source project.