John Siracusa has posted a quite thought provoking piece about the power games unfolding between Google, Apple, Facebook and others.  Let’s say you wanted to own a cirtical open source project, i.e. own a key standard.  How might you go about that.  He makes a case, that has some merit(sic), that contribution rates can be used by a firm to buy control of an open source project.  If so, then it’s only a matter of money and time.

It’s a good essay and worth reading.  In my limited experience firms are rarely this strategic; but in retrospect they can stumble into outcomes like these – moving fast, hill climbing, and a bit of impatient greed can goes a long way.  But, yeah – who knows … he might be right.