Recently, in one of my Gas Station columns I’ve been writing about the “donation ” of WebLogic Workshop 8.1 IDE to the open source community. Workshop was a dead end product, and BEA got rid of it in a smart way earning credits for being a software donor.

And now BEA announced their acquisition of M7, and IDE maker that created NitroX, a tool for Eclipse for development with JSP, JSF and Struts. If you do not know, the dumped Workshop 8.1 was also meant to simplify JSP development using a NetUI libraries built on top of Struts. Now BEA executives say that this purchase “fills the gap ” without mentioning that they have created this gap themselves by getting rid of Workshop last year. BTW, anyone knows the fate of donated Workshop? Did anything good come out of it?

It looks like dump-to-open-source-buy-real-staff model becomes popular these days. Last week IBM has donated a part of their RUP tools to Eclipse. I do not know what was wrong with these tools, but something should have been not right. Let’s just wait for new RUP-related acquisition announcements from IBM.