@FIRST_LIGHT

Big day for deals!

Oracle buys BEA

This one wasn’t a surprise of course, but the drama around the negotiations made for some great entertainment.

I thought this Infoworld article had some good analysis on the deal as it relates to open source:

…pulling in BEA may also help the company keep the threat of open source alternatives at bay. Oracle has always had an ambiguous relationship to open source. It was quick to adopt Linux as a preferred platform, a good hedge against both Microsoft and Sun. But it has otherwise strived to keep the open source middleware and database genies in the bottle, going to a lot of trouble to run interference against up-and-coming rivals Red Hat and MySQL.

It is shaping up to be an interesting marketplace for infrastructure software. Oracle appears to be barricading itself in the old cathedral and Sun has rediscovered its passion about the bazaar. There may be a period of open source venture proliferation, followed by a shakeout and consolidation, possibly culminating in an oligopoly of open source technology and business stacks. Or it may be something completely different. Time will tell. But we’re going to see some very interesting shifts in the software landscape in the next 3-5 years and it’s going to be fun to be part of it all.

Bringing it closer to home, what does all of this mean for Drupal? I’m not quite sure yet. It’s very early days for Drupal, despite the passing of its seventh birthday. I think I agree with Dries that a period of open source CMS consolidation is coming soon. That may prove to be a microcosm of the big industry plate tectonics described above. I hope to be part of making sure Drupal stays on top.