Openbravo Acquires Librepos

Here's a classic example of an open source micro-acquisition:

This acquisition will benefit the Librepos community of users and developers for several reasons. First, the continuation of Librepos is now guaranteed, Librepos will be an independent product of the Openbravo portfolio hosted in Sourceforge, and is and will be open source and licensed under the GPL. Forums will continue actively and there will be frequent releases of Librepos. Openbravo is a company truly committed to open source and believes in the strengths of the community to drive innovation.

Second, I will continue to be involved in the future of Librepos. I am the founder and main developer of Librepos since I published Librepos in January 2005. Now I joined Openbravo as Senior Architect and Librepos is part of my responsibilities. This is also great for me because previously to this acquisition I used to spend my spare time on Librepos, now I will have more time for Librepos, because now Librepos is part of my job.

One of the biggest problems with young open source projects that depend on one or a few key coders is ensuring their survival and continuity. Being bought is one obvious way to do that, with the benefits listed above. In fact, the benefits are far greater in the case of a small open source project than they are for a small closed-source product company.

As the comment above points out, open source projects, even successful ones, are often part-time jobs for the coders - something that is rarely the case in the world of traditional software. Bringing several smaller software projects together, as with Openbravo and Librepos, really is a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.