Why compete when you can buy the competition?

An article with the headline "Third Brigade buys open-source rival" truly stood out from the headlines yesterday. Why would a company acquire its rival, let alone an open source rival? Why would this be approved? Would consumers benefit from less competition? This had shades of XenSource.

Third Brigade has bought OSSEC, an open-source competitor to its host intrusion detection and prevention system.

Ottawa-based Third Brigade said it had bought the OSSEC project and related trademarks, as well as copyrights held by the project's creator and primary developer, Daniel Cid, and the OSSEC.net domain, website and website content.

[...]

No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

The press release announcing it is here. It seems like a case of stifling competition by simply buying it. The Microsoft-Novell deal too was a sort of non-compete agreement. Novell got paid handsomely for it. ⬆