Published at LXer:
Lots of young companies / start-ups are only interested by open source as long as it helps them to create value and be bought by a larger and often closed source proprietary company. They only focus on the economical and legal aspect of open source and somehow disregard other key aspects of open source like : social/community, ethics, political/governance, etc. Lots of recent example (OpenOffice/Oracle, Java/Oracle, MySQL/Oracle, Zimbra/VMWare, ...) can be studied. Most of those open source projects are flaky at best and have to design an emergency plan (think disaster recovery here) in order to ... survive. The long term effects are linked to the brand damage those case produce on the Open Source brand...
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