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Blog: Mark Madsen

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Microsoft Buying Open Source With Yahoo

I was going to write something about negative effects on open source of Microsoft buying Yahoo (I briefly mentioned this in the Intelligent Enterprise article) but I see no need to repeat what Blankenhorn and Rooney wrote at ZDNet:

"Microsoft’s proposed $45 billion buy of Yahoo would give the Redmond, Wash company control over a top open source e-mail company, open source projects and an open source infrastructure. On September 17 of 2007, Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million. Yahoo’s infrastructure is built on BSD. Yahoo has released a myriad of software to the open source community and even sponsors some open source projects."

I'm not sure if the risks of big vendors stepping on open source are over-emphasized or not. Given the nature of the GPL, it's always possible for people to jump ship and fork projects as happened with Joomla-Mambo. The question is whether key developers for projects have the means to do so, particularly when so many newer open source startups are VC funded and this is their day job.
What I find more worrisome is the potential to lose more IP (copyright or patents) to big vendors who see no problem using IP as a weapon to stifle innovation.

  Posted by mmadsen on February 4, 2008 12:48 PM |

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