Open-source software, which by its traditional definition is developed collaboratively by informal groups and available free to anyone, has been a major factor driving the growth of the internet, and especially the proliferation of blogs and small websites.

My company, NewWest.Net, and countless others would be nowhere without what's known inelegantly as the LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PhP. They are, respectively, an operating system, a web server, a database and a programming language. They are all very powerful, open-source solutions that generally cost nothing.

Given that, two big software deals announced last week are, on the face of it, a bit puzzling, and perhaps alarming. The Swedish company that's behind MySQL was bought by Sun Microsystems for $1 billion, and the British company behind another piece of excellent open-source software that we use, OpenAds, received a $15 million round of funding.

more here