A project can be a good solution for a problem but if it has no financial support it will disappear. This happens specially in the world of software.

I would like to talk about one of the most famous open source web browsers currently, Firefox.

It comes from a hard battle against Internet Explorer. After many years fighting it seems that FF is gaining more and more supporters. In deed, FF got money from Google for long time to remain in the battlefield.

But now Google has changed his mind launching his own browser, open source and crossplatform too. This implies that Chromium (or Chrome is the close version) is a direct competitor of FF.

The money now will go to improve Chromium instead of FF. I hope this won't stop FF from being the good alternative it is.

This week, after knowing some of the Oracle's plans about Sun's products, this situation could be spread to projects like Virtualbox or Netbeans. The game is the same, just the players change.