Well, JBoss might not be the Open Source company with the highest reputation in the community, nevertheless rumors about Oracle going on shopping tour in the OSS business world seem to come true: Today the Sleepycat (known for Berkely DB) deal was announced, others with JBoss and Zend might follow. So I wasn’t surprised when I read shortly afterwards about SugarCRM agreeing with Microsoft in some cooperation deal.
On the one hand I’m happy for the financial power that’s going into the Open Source movement since some long-time developers are already talking about the so-called volunteer fatigue. On the other hand I’m little bit afraid what effect these hundred-million-dollar-deals have upon the still motivated volunteer programmers. How long will people still be willing to code for fun? When will most of the Open Source programmers only continue to maintain a project to enhance their CV and thus to get better job offers? Be that as it may, there are lots of new research questions arising ;)