Media Lab Gets New Boss; More On Open-Source 'Co-optetition'
Frank Moss, veteran of stage, screen er, well IBM, is replacing the oh-so-urbane Nicholas Negroponte.
Moss knows the neighborhood. He used to head up consulting services for the then-independent Lotus Development., just down the river from MIT in Cambridge. He moved on and Lotus was engulfed and devoured by IBM. Moss then founded Tivoli Systems, which ended up being bought by—guess who—IBM. He remained there awhile to spearhead the computing giant's systems management push.
Then he moved on and founded (or co-founded) Bowstreet.
Late last year, Bowstreet was also bought by --you guessed it-- IBM.
Talk about your patterns of behavior. ...
HOW'S ABOUT A LITTLE 'CO-OPTETITION'?
The Linux/open source world continues to debate the whole notion of commercial companies buying up fan- favorite technologies.
The latest example is Oracle's buy of Sleepycat Software.
The fear in some quarters is that these giants—IBM, Oracle, Novell—will co-opt the great open-source promise. Others say nonsense. To them, what starts out as open source under the GPL will remain open source now and forever. But then there's this whole "Free Software" thing....
Dunno anything for sure, but maybe we should coin a new term for this trend of capitalists buying their opposite…. How about "co-optetition?"
(It's fun to make up new words just to drive spell-check crazy, no?)
You think Ray Noorda has a copyright on that one too?
What do you think? [email protected]