The Firebug story is a good and a bad thing. For starters the only reason I still use Firefox is because Firebug is awesome. In the article at least Firefox gives credit to Firebug where it's due, but it's a bit like OS X notifications taking Growl's idea and leaving Growl to rot. Maybe that's a bit dramatic, but it's a common story now a days. Indie developer develops something awesome for big companies eco-system. Big company takes idea and leaves indie dev to die. I am not privy to the entire story but it sure would have been nice if mozilla could have at least done an acquire-hire for the Firebug team (assuming they wanted it). You know show some love for the greatness they gave to the dev community.
Mozilla has been paying the main Firebug developer for a long time to work on it, but I've never heard of an open source project that would like to be "acquired", whatever that means. If hiring all of the project's developers is what you mean, quite a few of them had high profile jobs already, so funding wasn't an issue here. As for the reasons why simply incorporating Firebug into Firefox wasn't a viable solution, see the original post.
