I'm curious how others think this will impact Spring framework, since Pivotal (sponsors of Spring) is mostly owned by EMC / VMware. What is Dell's OSS record and how does that fit into Dell's business?
I think you are so many degrees of separation away that you should be fine. EMC has always been very hands off with VMware, and VMware is relatively hands off with Pivotal.
The most possible disruptive outcome is that Pivotal spins out entirely, but I don't see that happening for a while, or even being influenced one way or the other by the Dell/EMC deal.
I wouldn't worry about it assuming you've got a timeline for the next 12-24 months.
Pivotal was spun out. It's a privately owned company with EMC, VMware, and GE as large investors. OSS isn't going away at Pivotal any time soon, it's core to a number of business models.
As an aside, Pivotal also heads up Cloud Foundry, which is an open source PaaS that runs on top of every IaaS. We have been good at selling it to large companies (I work at Pivotal). Everyone in this thread is wondering how EMC breaks into cloud computing, but no is mentioning Cloud Foundry. That's currently the tip of the spear.
I believe Pivotal will actually come out of this amazingly. With GE and IBM money fueling Cloud Foundry (an amazing PaaS), I would imagine Pivotal to be the best positioned here.
