Open source financial success stories. Aquisitions, mergers, and IPOs.

Open source software (OSS) has been around since the inceptions of modern day computing. The ability of the Internet to bring together communities of developers to collaboratively work on software projects has helped the concept of OSS explode.

Many have tried to find ways to make money using an OSS stategy, but only few have succeeded. Some of the early successes revolved around Linux. The likes of Red Hat, VA Linux, and Turbo Linux all had varying impact on finacial markets when they went public. Red Hat seems to be the one that has found decent success and is still strong within the OSS market.

There have been few open source vendors who have generated enough interest to generate an IPO offering since the dot com bust of 2000. Recently we´ve been seeing a shift in the strategy for open source vendors. Most success stories are now coming from aquistions or mergers. Most recent evidence comes from Sun´s aquisition of Innotek (Virtual Desktop Software), the $1Billion aquisiton of mysql database platform, Novell´s aquisition of Suse Linux, Oracle and Sleepcat database, IBM and Gluecode, to name a few.

OSS has proven to be an integral part of most large technology companies. The low cost of entry for consumers, low cost of sales for vendors (self downloads/evals), the flexibility, and adaptability have proven advantages.

What drives the OSS industry are successful open source communities. I believe that acquisitions will help drive the creation of more start-ups. This in turn will increase competition and improve the overal quality of software we use on a day to day basis.

Vassilios
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http://www.outervillage.com

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Vassilios
Co-Founder
OuterVillage.com
http://outervillage.com

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