Orion Letizi

Commercial open source software has arrived. There have been commercial sponsors of open source projects for a long time, but the recent spate of high-price (for open source, at least) acquisitions of companies with open source products at the core of their business has made a splash in the technology industry. In addition, Sun’s convulsions into the open source world have left the Java landscape decisively in open source territory. Is this recent trend toward commercial open source good for open source software? Is it good for the Java developer? Is the utopian spirit of the open source movement about to get crushed by greed, profit seeking, and evil corporate maneuvering? Well…let’s see. Open source software has had a clearly beneficial impact on the tools we use everyday. It provides a rich and varied ecosystem where technologies can compete purely on their merit... (more)