Sun will buy SpringSource.
Maybe it will take until 2009, since Spring is still growing quickly and the more traction, the more $$$, but this makes too much sense not to happen.
Why would Sun buy SpringSource? The Spring team has been working hard for a long time, they could use a cash out at this point (I guess), so someone will pick them up. I thought BEA might buy SpringSource since it would allow them to change to a product+OS+services strategy from a purely closed-product one (with some OS contributions like XMLBeans). SpringSource is all about openness - anyone can plug their components into the container. Sun is showing the world that they are all about openness. What did Jonathan Schwartz say after the MySQL announcement?
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What happens to your commitment to PostgreSQL?
It grows. The day before we announced the acquisition, and within an hour of signing the deal, I put a call into Josh Berkus, who leads our work with Postgres inside of Sun. I wanted to be as clear as I could: this transaction increases our investment in open source, and in open source databases. And increases our commitment to Postgres - and the database industry broadly. The same goes for our work with Apache Derby, and our JavaDB.
Josh says it exactly right on his blog - Sun wants to be the leading provider of datacenters. Not just MySQL datacenters. Exactly.
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They are churning into a services organization built around open source. I was consulting with a CTO some time ago and we discussed a feature of a product we were designing and I said, "Why don't we leave it out and you can make more money providing services?" His reply was, "I can make much more money on that same head if they are writing software." So maybe the margins aren't as high in services than product. Perhaps Open Source changed the parameters to that equation. Even if it hasn't, this is Sun's model, and it's better than dying by eating only off your own farm.The other advantage for Sun is that it will show that they are not letting their leading server technology - Java EE compete for favor against Spring, which is seems to be losing, if for no other reason than it's not latest and greatest anymore, and developers love latest and greatest. Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong proponent of component containers and Spring (especially since now I don't have to have to use verbose, external XML). It's just that Spring wouldn't exist without Java EE. It would have taken a decade of dozens of teams to get it all working right - they are standing on top of the Java EE giants.
If Sun buys SpringSource, they will again be rulers of the server-side. Now if they could only get a container for the client side...
