What to make of Sun buying Innotek?

I think that's the best way to explain Sun's purchase of Innotek, the German developer of the open source VirtualBox.

Microsoft now has a virtualizer, following Citrix' purchase of XenSource. VMWare is just too expensive following its successful IPO -- it's worth twice what Sun itself is worth.

I know a lot is being written, both inside and outside Sun, about the technical merits of the VirtualBox approach. But if the approach has merit, then it will benefit Sun, because VirtualBox is open source, and will remain so.

Yet, as we've noted here many times, that's not how Sun rolls. It may be at the bottom of the open source license incline, but it's at the top of the development incline. Unless it controls a project it doesn't want to play.

My question is, what does that control mean, in practical terms? Is it really necessary for a large company to control an open source project's creator in order for it to gain maximum benefit from that project?

Sun says yes. I think Wall Street generally says yes. I think the success of Eclipse and Linux argue the answer is no.

Moreover, the license terms continue to say no. If you don't like what Sun does with VirtualBox going forward, you can fork it.

If enough of you choose to follow the fork you'll essentially take it over, as WordPress took over b2/cafelog. That is if the support for the fork is greater than that for the original creation, the fork wins.

Doubtless Sun believes it can give VirtualBox far more support with its Innotek purchase than anyone else could for a fork. Right now this is true.

But at some point open source leadership is going to be challenged, somewhere. At some point a big company is going to take an open source project in what others see as a proprietary direction and the users are going to revolt.

I think that's going to be the next step in open source's evolution. Feel free to disagree.