Mentor bought by Siemens

Personally, I'm not too worried about what happens with Mentor. I saw their products when they were just getting started and have never used any of them since. I guess I just don't have much need for expensive commercial tools when I can use free tools from the chip vendors. But then I don't work on large projects with multiple designers.

Just a small point regarding free tools. One of the main corporate developers of gcc, especially in the embedded world, is Code Sourcery. Several of the key gcc developers work there, and they are the main maintainers of embedded MIPS, PPC, embedded ARM (I think), as well as a number of lesser used architectures. And Code Sourcery is owned by Mentor these days. If a new owner of Mentor decided that contributing to free and open source software was no longer part of their business strategy, the impact on gcc (and related tools) would not be insignificant.

Of course, I have no idea what Siemens would want to do with that part of Mentor - damaging it would certainly be a silly idea.

I seem to recall that was exactly what Oracle did with OpenOffice when they bought Sun. They were going to shut down any further development but later changed their mind.

Oracle faffed around with OpenOffice so long after they bought it that everyone else involved in OpenOffice development started the LibreOffice project. (Remember, before Oracle bought Sun, most of the important OO development was already being done by outside groups.) Oracle were desperately trying to find a way to turn OO into money - but by totally misunderstanding the OO community, users and developers, they made it almost completely irrelevant. The only impact OpenOffice has now is to confuse people that don't understand the difference between OpenOffice and LibreOffice. There is no noticeable development of OO by either Oracle or anyone else. All the work is done by others, in the LibreOffice project.

As far as I can tell, when Mentor bought CodeSourcery, they basically said "We'll take care of the business stuff - the sales, the marketing, the integration with other products, the contracts with cpu manufacturers for new ports, etc. You folks can continue with the technical stuff - developing gcc, making the IDE packages, the libraries, the documentation, the gcc project leadership and developer community management, etc. And you can continue with the same mixture of commercial work and work for the gcc community as you did before - we'll pay your salary just the same." My understanding is that the CodeSourcery folks were happy with that arrangement, and you only have to look at the number of posts from CodeSourcery addresses on the gcc mailing lists to see how much they contribute.