Sun Acquires SeeBeyond

So here's what Sun had in mind...

Answering Jason Stamper's questions, CapeClear's David Clarke, VP of products, declared: "It is unlikely we will contribute to [the Celtix] project. We see this as a knee-jerk reaction to the assumption that because there is an open source application server (JBoss) there is a market for an open source ESB, but we see them as very different markets."

Even though one can doubt there would ever be a "market" for open source software (remember, the theory of free market and perfect competition assumes that goods are sold, which happends to not be the case for most open source projects), at least there are today two major open source players that believe the time is right for making open source ESB happen...

Sun will now be facing two harsh dillemmas:

• be faithful to open source and give up license revenues on SeeBeyond technologies, or milk the proprietary cow and look poorly credible on the Open ESB front -- or find a middle term, somewhere...
• push Java, JBI and Open ESB, and be embarrassed by non-Java SeeBeyond technos, or acknowledge there's a life after Java, and put Open ESB in a rather difficult position -- or have a finger in each pie...
  

The problem for Sun here is the classical issue of a commercial vendor that at the same time hosts a collaborative, nonprofit (eg open source) endeavor, and may have clear conflicts of interest with potential contributors to this endeavor.