Nimsoft: Another proprietary company, same old story

Gary Read at Nimsoft has commented on the recent acquisition of Hyperic by SpringSource under the title ‘No Surprise – Hyperic Falls‘. Maybe he knows something about the terms of the deal that we don’t but acquisitions and consolidation don’t normally mean failure.

But the interesting thing is his anti-open source statements. Anyone following open source for a long time will recognize these kind of statements.

They are the kind of things that Microsoft used to say about open source – before they partnered with Novel, shared their source, started CodePlex, and put open source components into Windows.

They are the kind of things that Oracle used to say about open source – before they acquired InnoDB and Sun.

Red Hat has a great video that they created on this topic – Truth Happens

I guess Nimsoft is lucky enough to be only at stage 2 in their competition with open source. The still have fighting and losing to go.

Update – May 5th 2009:

Gary Read responded to my post with a comment that included this statement:

We compete overwhelmingly with HP, IBM, CA, BMC – not with companies like Hyperic, Groundworks, Cittio etc.

This statement is very telling.

• They think they don’t compete with open source because they are never up against them in sales situations.
• The reason they don’t see them in sales situations is that many people are choosing an open source solution before they even call Nimsoft. They lose the opportunity before you know about it.

This is why Nimsoft is in the ignore/ridicule phase.