Commercial Entity Buying Up Open Source Software Alternatives
How does one compete against FREE? That’s an interesting question for Blackboard, a company which creates learning management systems (LMS). Blackboard previously engaged in buying up and either dismantling or integrating the competition into its own products–such as Elluminate, Prometheus, or WebCT–but open source alternatives like Moodle and Sakai present a different issue.
Going free with its own products did not entice enough users away from open source software (OSS) alternatives for projects like Moodle to fail. Fundamentally, ownership is not concentrated with open source because anyone can use, reuse, and modify the code base, so there is no way to buy up the companies producing OSS. One way around this dilemma is to purchase the companies which most support the development of its OSS rivals–if you cannot buy the company, you can purchase its resources and starve it out.
Monday, Blackboard specifically acquired Moodlerooms and Netspot, companies which support the Moodle course management software. On the one hand, this can appear a threatening corporate power play; on the other, it may signify a paradigm shift for the company towards cooperation rather than domination. Time will tell.
In the meantime, officials at Blackboard, Moodlerooms, and NetSpot paint a rosy picture with a “statement of principles” that commit to keeping the OSS development alive. So far, there is no word on what may occur if a value conflict arises between Blackboard and Moodle, and there is no indication if there will ultimately be a split in the development community as happened after Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems forked LibreOffice from OpenOffice. Informed of some pending corporate strategies, Moodle creator Martin Dougiamas shows cautious optimism for positive synergies resulting from more interrelation between Blackboard’s products and the two companies it purchased.
Creative Commons Love: opensourceway on Flickr.
Written by Jonathan Davidson
