Is 2008 going to be the Year of the Acquisition? Activity in 2007 was on the rise but now things seem to be at full speed.

• I remember when Alta Vista and Excite! were the hot search engines, my how the world has changed.  It looks like it’s narrowing down to a two horse race with Microsoft putting the moves on Yahoo! for about $44.6 billion (Notes from SearchEngineLand). I guess it’s really on now, Google versus Microsoft in a search engine death match.
• Yahoo! acquired Zimbra last year. I wonder …

Hyperic has announced a new major version of their HQ monitoring system that adds plenty of new capabilities. HQ enables companies with a web infrastructure to monitor all the various components of the stack, whether open source, closed or a mix. For example, HQ can monitor Windows, IIS, MySQL, and JBoss. Or whatever combination you have in your environment. The latest release also enables users to incorporate existing Nagios scripts and now uses MySQL as the back end database. The combination of HQ and MySQL has been used to track 1.5 million metrics per minute with plenty of headroom for... READ MORE

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It's only Tuesday and there have been two more acquisitions in the open source market. While these aren't huge deals on the scale of JBoss or MySQL, they do signify ongoing consolidation in the market. -Nokia acquires Trolltech -SpringSource acquires Covalent Both these acquisitions seem to make sense from a perspective of customers, users, and the companies on both sides. It's also interesting that these two recent deals show both the adoption of open source technology by a non-open source company and the combination of two open source companies to build a larger open source entity.... READ MORE

And on goes my fascination with open source companies and their valuations…

I was reading Stephen O’Grady’s commentary on open source companies and their valuations prompted by the recent acquisition of MySQL by Sun for $1 billion. He quotes Jeff Gould who logically questions whether Sun can make the acquisition pay-off.

Stephen also quotes a piece from Knowledge@Wharton on the myth of market share.

It is a common practice of many companies to focus their attention on grabbing market share from their competitors. But such efforts can actually be detrimental to the firm’s profitability, according to Wharton marketing professor J. Scott …

Today Nokia announced their intention to acquire an open source tools manufacturer, Trolltech.

Trolltech is an open source company by virtue of their dual-licensing of the QT tool kit that is used by a number of products but probably most notably the KDE desktop. Though they do dual license and sell commercial proprietary products as well.

The Nokia deal was reported in kroners …

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Here are a few upcoming open source conferences worth paying attention to: - SugarCRM Developers Conference, Feb 6-8, San Jose, CA - PHP Quebec, March 12-14, Montreal, Canada - EclipseCon, March 17-20, Santa Clara, CA - OSBC, March 25-26, San Francisco, CA - ApacheCon Europe, April 7-11, Amsterdam, NL - MySQL Conference & Expo, April 14-17, Santa Clara, CA We'll have MySQLers at most if not all of these events. If you're thinking of hitting your boss up for a conference registration and travel, look for the early registration deadlines. You can easily save a few hundred bucks by registering... READ MORE

A number of people have emailed me wondering why I haven't blogged about the Sun/MySQL deal. Well, I'm still working out my thoughts on that, so I'll leave it to another day. Besides, haven't there been enough blog posts about it already?!

As a PHP community member and a person who has been participating on MySQL's behalf in the much-maligned PDOv2 working group, there is a more important and pressing topic of conversation that I'd like to comment on. Namely, the recent events surrounding the publication of the FAQ about PDOv2. There are many different topics being bandied around the PHP community schoolyard — some on-topic, some wildly off-topic and tangential. These are the issues I think represent what the majority of conversations have been about:

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