Ok, at least they tried. But it seems SAP has for now put their attempts to rest to smoose up a bit closer to OSS. I guess Oracle-InnoDB deal send enough shockwaves around the SAP HQ to kill of any of the little wishpers that had made the surprising MySQL-SAP deal happen in the first time. Now things have come full circle again, MaxDB development is not only back at SAP as I have noted before, its also back to [https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/wiki?path=/display/MaxDB/FAQ& closed source development]. At the same time most big European OSS companies seem to end up in the hands of US based companies.
A while ago Novel scooped up SUSE. Recently MySQL AB was bought up by Sun. The biggest European software maker SAP seems to have gone back to its OSS oblivious state, so where does this leave us? Is Nokia now the biggest OSS software company in Europe with its Maemo Linux distro and recent acquisition of Trolltech? Who am I missing?
Then again, do we really need a European owned big time company? Europe is still very strong in the OSS space, its just more dominated by smaller companies, rather than big time companies. Personally I find small companies much more interesting. With the recent creation of an EU OSS license (note: I do not like the creation of yet another license, but this one is probably better aligned with EU law and is translated into all relevant languages), I am also hopeful that EU knows the importance of OSS for ensuring independence in its IT infrastructure. So I guess I do not see much reason for concern. Actually we should be more concerned about the lack of a top European search engine and maps service that spans beyond national boarders across the entire continent.
OBOOE, the Open Business Organizations of Europe (http://www.obooe.eu) is trying to build more cooperation between open source companies in Europe. Next meeting will be in FOSDEM this weekend.
The idea is to enable networking between small European OSS companies through matchmaking and sharing of case studies. This should make us all more competitive with the larger American companies.
Without forgetting innotek (http://innotek.de/ http://www.virtualbox.org) which is being acquired by Sun. Innotek is well known for their virtual machine software VirtualBox (working on windows, linux, OS X, Solaris).
Hmm... Yes it is a shame that SAP is not doing more to support Open Source. MaxDB could have been so much better and they could easily do more to support PHP/Pearl/Python. They are doing some interesting stuff with grails.
Well, you have heard this from me before, but I think this is just more examples of SAP not understanding open source. The strength for companies like SAP to get involved in open source is to center themselves around open source projects, not corporate open source products. With a project based approach, they get to leverage other companies development efforts, can put forth minimal development efforts focused on the specifics they need, and free themsleves from having to worry about some other companies goals being more important than thier own.
100% agree about the OpenSource momentum in Europe; we (GlassFish) are seeing it all over the place. Europe is ahead of the US in adoption of Open Source, although the US has started getting very seriously on OSS this last year. Regarding development, some companies (like MySQL) are really good about capitalizing on the developer expertise regardless of where the developers are located. It makes sense, a small team with very strong developers can move very quickly. Although sometimes informal communication across different cultures and geographies can be a challenge. - eduard/o
