This is a perfectly valid business model and I know lots of companies and senior executives that have no ambitions beyond this.

Going back to the company then, it is possible that Liferay is only interested in having a good enough business that it will pay for the lifestyles of those involved (indeed, the company gives a proportion of its profits to charity every month) and that they donвЂ™t want to conquer the world. In any case, as I have argued before, open source is just another licensing model. There is some truth in this argument, particularly with respect to the open source movement but commercial enterprises want support, training and other back-up facilities that you donвЂ™t get without a company to back the product up. Of course, you could argue that it is the product that is more important than the company. Worse, there is absolutely nothing about the product on the companyвЂ™s web site-not even a mention of it-you have to go to the Greenplum site for that. Now, despite the fact that I have an introduction from Greenplum (one of the exceptions when it comes to open source marketing), which is a partner of Kinetic Networks, the company has continually failed to answer my e-mails requesting more information. As an example, I am trying to get details about the open source KETL ETL (extract, transform and load) product from Kinetic Networks. So, why havenвЂ™t you heard of Liferay? Because it is an open source vendor and open source companies donвЂ™t tend to market themselves very well. There is at least one pure play portal vendor still in the market, which is Liferay. The second point with respect to this purchase is that it has been touted elsewhere as representing the demise of the pure play portal vendor, following earlier acquisitions of companies like CoreChange (by Open Text) and TopTier (by SAP). Interesting questions but it is not my intention to address these in this article. The first is the perennial question of integration that arises whenever a vendor buys another that has a directly competing offering: how will the two products be merged? How long will it take? Will they, in fact, be merged at all? If not, how long will the acquired product continue to be supported? And so on and so forth. Analysis Plumtree is being acquired by BEA.

Portal alive and kicking