Application framework developer SpringSource is to acquire support provider Covalent Technologies as demand for services to back up open-source software investments builds up, and as open-source companies sell up or pair off.
Best known for its Spring line of products, three-year-old SpringSource’s products already sit alongside many Apache Tomcat application servers. Nineteen-year-old Covalent’s traditional strength has been in supporting Apache projects.
The combination demonstrates the way in which open-source companies are being acquired to capitalise on open-source building blocks, notably the so-called Lamp stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl.
In his blog, SpringSource chief executive Rod Johnson wrote: “Sun paid $1bn for the ‘M’ in Lamp. Now that Covalent's outstanding Apache expertise and services are part of SpringSource, we are strong leaders in the ‘A’.”
Other leading open-source firms that have sold out include Suse (to Novell), JBoss (Red Hat), Zimbra (Yahoo), Sleepycat Software and Innobase (both Oracle).
Ross Mason, chief technology officer of open-source enterprise service bus firm MuleSource, said, “This validates the open-source business model and [shows that] when deciding to deploy open-source products such as Spring into production, organisations need support from the commercial vendor behind the product.”
However, third-party support specialists said they still have an important role.
Chris Halls, UK managing director of free software consultancy Credativ, said, “More often than not now, companies are wanting to run open-source software across their complete stack once they get the first part up and running. Where somebody has gone for Tomcat on the appserver, they’ll also go for Spring and an open-source database. But nobody supports everything. SpringSource has Spring and Tomcat covered but they’re not supporting the Linux distribution or anything else.”
