Open source protects the innocent bystanders in corporate battles

While the negotiations and prevarications over the IBM purchase of Sun Microsystems continues, all the rest of us can do it sit and wait to see what happens. I don't really see what IBM will get by buying Sun that it couldn't have some other, cheaper way, but since I don't own shares in either company, I have little more than a passing interest in whether it's a good deal financially.

I do care more about the effect the merger would have on the industry, and software development in particular. Both companies have a large influence on what happens in the non-Microsoft development world, and between them have Java toolchains more or less sewn up — Eclipse, originally an IBM project, and NetBeans, Sun's own IDE, have seen off most proprietary Java development tools.

This would be more of a worry if IBM and Sun were still locked into a proprietary software model themselves, but thankfully they've spent the past few years trying to out-open source each other. The result of this has been some great tools for creating all sorts of applications, all released under decent licences — not least Java itself.

If the merger does go ahead, the last thing developers have to worry about is losing their favourite tools. Free licensing means they can't be taken away, no matter what.