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Topic: Mergers and Acquisitions
Whether a merger or acquisition is hostile or friendly, consolidation always means change
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The Pentaho project (which produces open source "Business Intelligence" tools) has suggested an interesting "Beekeeper model" analogy to characterize how open source communities exist, which seems pretty relevant:
http://wiki.pentaho.org/display/BEEKEEPER/3.TheBeekeeper+Model
Some of the points are pretty relevant:
- A beekeeper (OSS-incubating organization) needs to provide an environment that attracts and encourages the bees (OSS software developers) to "do their thing," which is to produce honey
"Attractive" doesn't necessarily involve throwing money at the hive.
- Organizational stability tends to be very important; a hive in turmoil doesn't produce much honey, and a group of developers that see things being unstable won't produce much useful code.
- The bees are free to leave and join a different hive, should the present one lose its attraction. In the same way, OSS projects can and do migrate and fork, and this frequently happens when the "beekeepers" make mistakes that undermine organizational stability.
- The beekeeper has very little direct control over the bees. This is certainly true for many OSS projects; developers work on whatever things they perceive as useful.
In the case of MySQL, pretty much all of the developers are employees that are under reasonably tight control (unlike the bees), so the analogy does not totally fit. That actually represents a way in which MySQL has never actually been a "open source community," so that they don't totally fit in...