I have absolutely no information about acquisitions surrounding any of those companies, although I do work with a few of them. I wanted to share my opinion based on my experience in executive positions I held at an open source company called Turbolinux starting in 1998. At different times, I managed the alliances, business development, and product marketing there. I've also been monitoring open source acquisitions over the past few years related to my job as a consultant.

I think that the most likely acquisitions are by large, proprietary software companies that want to dabble in open source business models. Look at Oracle's acquisition of Sleepycat Software or IBM's acquisition of Gluecode in May of 2005. At one point, there were a bunch of rumors that Oracle was looking at acquiring other open source companies. We could also reference transactions like the Jan 2004 acquisition of SuSE by Novell.

I would think about a company that has a lot of success from selling proprietary software and wants to explore a new market with open source.

Any of those three companies, Oracle, IBM, Novell, would fit into that category. They also have a history of acquiring open source companies. Remember Sun Microsystems move with StarOffice? There's a company that needs an open source injection boost.

Other companies like HP or Symantec might dabble in the future.

We could also start to analyze investments by proprietary software companies into open source companies. An investment is a way for a company to get a taste of the open source market. Turbolinux got about $95M in investment from VCs and from over a dozen companies that made money from proprietary technologies.

Open source acquisitions is an interesting topic and one that I've thought about in the past for other open source companies. I want to emphasize that I don't have any information about the companies that you mentioned. These are purely my personal thoughts.