If Oracle Bought Every Open Source Company

An anonymous reader points out Glyn Moody's thought experiment: what if Oracle bought up the entire open source ecosystem? Who would win, who would lose? And how might an open ecosystem grow in the wake of such an event? "Recently, there was an interesting rumour circulating that Oracle had a war chest of some $70 billion, and was going on an acquisition spree. Despite the huge figure, it had a certain plausibility, because Oracle is a highly successful company with deep pockets and an aggressive management. The rumour was soon denied, but suppose Oracle decided to spend, if not $70 billion, say $10 billion in an efficient way: how might it do that? One rather dramatic use of that money would be to buy up the leading open source companies mdash; all of them."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.slashdot.org%2Fstor y%2F10%2F07%2F27%2F1843246%2FIf-Oracle-Bought-Every-Open-Source-Company" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=If+Oracle+Bought+Every+Open+Source+Com pany%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2FcENlk6" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/27/1843246/If-Oracle-Bought-Every-Open-Source-Company?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1BtkNcL8grsKRx-97rIqD9aNWtc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1BtkNcL8grsKRx-97rIqD9aNWtc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1BtkNcL8grsKRx-97rIqD9aNWtc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1BtkNcL8grsKRx-97rIqD9aNWtc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/BFIKqJtD4ZI" height="1" width="1"/

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