It takes time, leadership, and a fair amount of luck to successfully build an open-source community. It also takes money. Lots of it, if IBM’s $1 billion commitment to Linux is any indication.
Unfortunately, the return on such open-source community investments may be permanently scuppered by the European Commission’s misguided defense of MySQL from Oracle’s intended acquisition. If the EC is going to punish successful open-source endeavors like MySQL, will investors still clamor to finance the rise of open source?
Unfortunately, the EC seems intent on punishing MySQL–both community and company–for its success. Already the MySQL database project has started to fracture into competing forks, while business rivals like EnterpriseDB and IBM collect confused customers.
More worryingly, the EC’s actions may end up diminishing potential returns to investors in other open-source projects, particularly those that take the added time and cost to build global communities.
Read the whole story at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10376536-16.html
