I’ve blogged once before about email-sniffing Tacit Software and its founder (and my old boss) David Gilmour. So I was a bit saddened to read this story on VentureBeat entitled Oracle Scoops Up Tacit’s Intellectual Property.
Now, happily, I lack personal experience in such matters, but I think that “normally” when software companies sell their IP assets to Oracle, it’s a — uh — bad sign. I take it to mean that (1) the company’s winding down operations, (2) that no one wishes to buy the business as a going-concern, thus purchasing both all assets and all liabilities, and ergo (3) that — in the absence of other interest — someone can come along and simply buy all or some of the assets.
I’d not seen any stories on Tacit shutting down, so I was surprised to hear they were selling IP to Oracle. This Network World story has a little more detail, but the final clue came from Oracle’s website, here:
Oracle has also hired all of the software engineers from Tacit Software.
It looks as if it’s “goodbye Tacit” and presumably “poof” to most of the $29M in venture capital invested.
