Could any major problems hit open source projects?

[JohneG]

I ask this cause recently i heard about Open Office. Can't remember the full details but i gathered it Sun Microsystems might be doing something that could put the project in jeopardy. Can this ever really happen to open source projects? I'm assuming in this case Sun Microsystems maintain the project but it's open to anyone to improve it. If anything did ever happen to any of the big open source projects such as this what do you think would happen to the software? Surely by the nature of being open source other people will take on maintaining such projects or fork them. So my question is do you think the big open source projects (or any open source project) can be affected by its main distributors going off and doing something different? Is open source going to keep developing despite such things happening?

[Ric_NYC]

On April 20, 2009, Sun and Oracle announced a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun. The proposed transaction is subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently, and it is business as usual.


http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/

[Shpongle]

due to it being open source someone else could just recompile the code and put it back out , thats the beauty , nothing ever really dies, just bits of code added and taken away

[katie-xx]

I would guess the biggest threat to Open Source projects is the threat of litigation from patent holders.
A lot of people think Mono is high risk ..but there again, a lot of different people think its not.


Kate

[zekopeko]

I would guess the biggest threat to Open Source projects is the threat of litigation from patent holders.
A lot of people think Mono is high risk ..but there again, a lot of different people think its not.


Kate


Any FOSS project is under threat of patents. Mono is in a far better position then the majority of FOSS out there.

Now to answer the OP's question.
One major problem could be the sudden loss of corporate backing. Think MySQL which destiny is still uncertain. For large projects you need corporate backing so that you can exploit it economically. A bunch of volunteers that are hacking stuff part time won't cut it when you are talking about critical infrastructure parts of some business system.

[katie-xx]

Now to answer the OP's question.


??????????????????????????


Kate

[HappinessNow]

I would guess the biggest threat to Open Source projects is the threat of litigation from patent holders.
A lot of people think Mono is high risk ..but there again, a lot of different people think its not.


Kate
Companies like Apple trying to claim open source as patentable technology then clogging the courts with frivolous lawsuits, ie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation