TheOpenAnalyst » Mergers & Acquisitions

In acquiring Merrill Lynch, must Bank of America open source its software?

TheOpenAnalyst — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 07:47:58 +0000

Lost in the rubble of the teetering titans of finance is an open question: what will happen to the open-source software that they have heavily modified and upon which many have built core business applications?

It’s a nontrivial question. Bank of America just acquired Merrill Lynch. Merrill Lynch was a heavy adopter of and modifier of open-source software. Because it never distributed that software, it was able to keep its modifications private.

In acquiring Merrill Lynch, must Bank of America open source its software? | The Open Road – CNET News

Open source after the M&A honeymoon

TheOpenAnalyst — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 02:36:00 +0000

InformationWeek’s Charles Babcock takes a fascinating look into the pros and cons of open-source mergers and acquisitions, and comes up with some interesting perspectives in the process. In sum, if you want to acquire an open-source software company, you’d better be very clear about what you’re buying, and how you’re going to pull value from it.

Squeeze too hard, and you risk alienating the community of customers, developers, and interested onlookers that made the open-source project successful. Squeeze too lightly, and you end up being popular and poor.

Open source after the M&A honeymoon | The Open Road – CNET News

A New Model: Open Source Software After It’s Acquired

TheOpenAnalyst — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 02:36:00 +0000

Roy Fielding, chief scientist at Day Software and co-founder of the original Apache Web server project, is the kind of guy who oozes cred in the open source community. He was lead architect on the HTTP specification and described Representational State Transfer–we know it simply as REST today–as a development method in his doctoral dissertation eight years ago.

When Fielding joined the OpenSolaris community advisory board in 2005,
Sun Microsystems hailed his presence as a sign of its commitment to
open source. The honeymoon ended in February, when Fielding resigned.
Sun’s pledge to give the community authority over OpenSolaris was “a
sham,” Fielding wrote in his letter of resignation.

A New Model: Open Source Software After It’s Acquired — Open Source Software — InformationWeek