Turning point or Kiss of death?

For those of you already having enough of all the financial turmoil, take a look at the world of science instead. There's a bunch of Nobel laureates out there, and this snippet particularly caught my eye: Springer, the German scientific publisher with a few half-hearted open access publishing trials to its name, is buying BioMed Central, a pioneer of open access publishing.

Obviously, OA in a science publishing context has very little to do with open access to telecommunications networks, but there is an interesting parallel here. It's kind of like KPN buying - well, what should I fill in here?
What's more: it remains to be seen if the move is a step toward OA, or a way to bury OA alive. It wouldn't be the first time to see interesting start-ups be swallowed whole and never be heard of again ...