Is open source becoming the dumping ground for no-longer-wanted software, sort of like a Salvation Army dropoff point for programs instead of old clothes?Some recent announcements lend credence to this argument. Red Hat on Thursday announced it would acquire Netscape’s Directory Server and Certificate Management System from AOL and make them available via open source. This follows Computer Associates’s announcement in May that it would offer the Ingres database via open source. IBM is doing the same thing with the Cloudscape embeddable database it became the owner of when acquiring the Informix database business three years ago. This is not to say that open source is just for products that have perhaps faded from the limelight, which was the case with Ingres. Sun Microsystems is making its Project Looking Glass 3D user interface technology available via open source, and that software is next-generation, not old-time or obsolete. This is also not to say that open source software is not high-quality, whether it’s new projects or old software.Putting products such as the Netscape offerings or Ingres into open source makes sense because it gives new life to these technologies and it certainly works for developers, too. Enterprise IT departments, for their part, can only benefit by having a broader selection of software made available at minimal or no cost.Hopefully, the trend of putting older software into the open source arena is one that will only increase. Technology Industry