OStatic

GigaOm has an interesting post up today on how technology mergers and acquisitions are back in favor. At the end of last year, I predicted that 2009 would be filled with many open source-related mergers and acquisitions. So far, the pace has been slower than I expected, although there have been some blockbuster-sized acquisitions, including Oracle's $7.4 billion play for Sun Microsystems, and VMware's $420 million acquisition of SpringSource. Are we about to see open source-related acquisitions pick up significantly, and do we want to see that happen? Who is ripe for the picking?

Acquia, which provides commercial support for and its own distribution of the Drupal content management system (CMS), today gave attendees at Drupalcon Paris 2009 a first look at Drupal Gardens. The project had been previously code-named Acquia Gardens, and is the company's upcoming software-as-a-service version of Drupal designed to speed the design and deployment of Drupal social publishing sites for non-technical users including small business owners and web designers. It looks like it could help extend Drupal out to many new users who might shy away from installing and learning Drupal from the ground up, and help Drupal compete with hosted publishing platforms.