By now you are probably aware that the European Commission has decided to launch an extended investigation into Oracle’s acquisition of Sun based on concerns over MySQL. The new has prompted a lot of criticism of the EC, much of it suggesting that the delay will do considerable harm to Sun (and therefore Oracle). This [...]

Open Database Alliance formed. Oracle buys Virtual Iron. AccesStream reaches version 1.0. And more.

Javier Soltero, former CEO of Hyperic, has maintained that the sale of Hyperic to SpringSource was driven by discussion between himself and SpringSource CEO, Rod Johnson, but the fact that the companies shared investors – Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital – no doubt accelerated the deal (and I wonder whether either could have afforded to [...]

There’s quite a bit of discussion about SpringSource’s annnounced acquisition of Hyperic, with all kinds of speculation on SpringSource’s competitive positioning, its desire to add a management component and, as we report, the importance of Hyperic’s focus on monitoring and managing applications in virtualized and cloud environments. What does not seem to be quite as [...]

“We’re both in the transportation business. We have a 747, and they have a Toyota.” The comparison of Oracle’s database and MySQL, made by Oracle president Charles Phillips at the 2004 Vortex Conference was undoubtedly meant as a criticism, but it so graphically demonstrated the differing business strategies and selling-points of the two products that [...]

Yesterday The 451 Group published Open to Investment, the latest CAOS research report, which examines the past, present and future of venture capital investment in open source-related vendors. The report contains analysis of the history of venture funding in open-source-related firms between 1997 and 2008, based on The 451 Group’s database of more than 370 [...]

IBM is in talks to acquire Sun, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal that cites “people familiar with the matter”. According to the report the deal on the table is $6.5bn in cash, although it sounds as if negotiations could be faltering: “People familiar with the matter cautioned that, while talks are [...]

Matt Asay thinks it is likely that Microsoft will acquire its first open source company in 2009. I think he may well be right that Microsoft’s involvement in open source is now at the point where an open source license should not be a deal breaker (especially if its a permissive one). At the same [...]

Open source BPM vendor Intalio turns 10 this year and is looking to celebrate by raising the funds necessary to finance a spending spree to acquire 8-10 open source vendors. Intalio’s CEO Ismael Ghalimi has sent an email to partners and users outlining the plan. He writes: The past 12 months have been especially interesting. [...]

As has been noted elsewhere, a report published recently by The 451 Group about opportunities for mergers and acquisitions of an by open source vendors is now freely available via The New York Times. The report is a more formal write up of some of thee issues discussed on this blog in November and updated [...]

I was thinking of writing a round-up of the key open source agenda items in 2008 but then I got distracted putting together some graphics, so – two birds with one stone – here’s open source in 2008 in pictures: (Some of these I’ve already written about, some of them I’ll write about next year. [...]

On the open source panel at the recent 451 client event I was asked by Raven what impact I expected the current financial situation to have on M&A for open source vendors. I responded that I expected to see an increase in M&A activity related to open source in the first half of next year. [...]

Who will be interested in 451 CAOS Theory? 451 analysts developed this blog as a forum to share links and perspectives on open source that are important to the enterprise open source community. The blog discusses and scrutinizes the opportunities and challenges and notes relevant news, trends and developments in the commercial open source marketplace. [...]

Valleywag reports that Monty Widenius has quit Sun. The Pythian Group reckons its true. Kaj Arno’s non-denial denial would appear to confirm it despite his protestations otherwise. “Technically there is no resignation letter. However, I spoke to Monty yesterday, and yes, resignation is an option he considers,” writes Kaj before expanding on some of the [...]

I mentioned just few weeks ago that virtualization specialist Qumranet, would make an “obvious target should Red Hat decide it needs more hypervisor in-house expertise.” It was so obvious that Red Hat announced today that it is to acquire Qumranet for $107m in cash, adding its KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) platform and SolidICE virtual desktop [...]

A classic Morecambe and Wise comedy sketch from the 1970s sees Andre Previn criticizing Eric for playing all the wrong notes while attempting the Greig Piano Concerto. Morecambe responds that he is in fact “playing all the right notes. But not necessarily in the right order.” I was reminded of the sketch this morning while [...]

Matt Asay writes today about the prospects for open source vendors going public or, more likely, being acquired, and wonders whether open source vendors should “hold out for an IPO” or “capitulate” and be acquired. The latter seems far more likely, especially in the current economic climate. We have written before about the open source [...]

Venture Capital Journal has published an interesting article (subscription required) analyzing the state of venture capital funding in open source software. While some of the data is somewhat lacking* the article makes up for it with insight from the likes of Robin Vasan, Peter Fenton, Amit Pandey, Cameron Lester, Harold Goldberg, Larry Augustin, Lisa Lambert [...]

I spent part of yesterday attending the Open Source Summit at Portland’s Innotech Business and Technology Conference, and moderating a panel on ‘IT Giants and Open Source.’ We had a great discussion about the reasons, roles, responsibilities and rewards for big vendors to be acutely and adequately participating in open source software development and commercialization. [...]

“Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL” screamed the headline on Slashdot last night. The headline is not entirely accurate (although slightly more accurate than the bizarre statement that “Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything”). So what is going on at MySQL? To get to the bottom of that you [...]