Filed under: Microsoft (MSFT), Sun Microsystems (JAVA), Oracle Corp (ORCL)

Last year, there was quite a bit of consolidation in the software sector, such as from Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and even SAP (NYSE: SAP).

And, yes the dealmaking is continuing into 2008. For example, this week, Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced it is shelling out $1 billion for MySQL, which develops an open source database.

Well, I had a chance to interview Raven Zachary, who is the Research Director of Open Source at the 451 Group:

Why the interest in open source? What is the business model — in light of the “free” part?

The interest in open source has been driven by end-user demand. As more open source (from operating systems to web servers to middleware to data integration to databases and beyond) is used by end-user organizations, there is an opportunity for monetization around open source. Back in 2004, we saw the beginning of a new wave on open source venture funding that has continued, peaking in 2006, but still at $300m+ per year. As this new wave of commercial open source companies build out a customer base, they become attractive targets for larger IT vendors.

Continue reading BloggingStocks Interview: Expert shows why Sun spent $1 billion on free software

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 6:57 am and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.