The billion dollar buy of MySQL is not the only financial news around open source these days. In fact financing and M&A around open source seems to be boiling over. George Dearing in this article in Information Week talks about recent funding of Alfresco and Automattic (the people behind WordPress). Then just a few days ago Nokia bought Trolltech for 150 million. As in any deal that involves open source companies being acquired by commercial entities the naysayers quickly questioned Nokia's commitment to the community and whether they would continue to offer and develop the open source products.  In this case Nokia and Trolltech put out a joint release reaffirming Nokia and Trolltechs commitment to open source, the community and the software.  Of course joint releases like that are as valuable as the paper they are written on and time will tell on this one.  Someone has to make money on that 150m price.

The latest open source deal is a little different. It involves one open source company buying another.  SpringSource has acquired Covalent.  SpringSource makes the Spring Framework for Java and Covalent of course are the developers of Tomcat, the Apache based Java application server.  We use Tomcat here at StillSecure, so this is one deal we will watch closely.  With both companies so closely aligned with their open source communities, i don't think too many people are worrying about the future of the projects. I didn't see any financial details disclosed for this one though. Here is one fact that caught my eye about these two companies though. SpringSource has more than 1,000 paying customers including 9 out of the top 10 largest banks in the world. Covalent has more than 3,000 paying customers and serves more than half of the Fortune 500.  Those numbers are pretty impressive.

In the meantime, when it comes to open source, the train keeps a rollin', all night and day long!