Open Source Weblog

To understand Marten's argument, you have to separate open source vendors into generations of - as he put it - grandfathers, fathers, and children, and then look at how many have followed through with an exit strategy:

First generation
Of the six open source IPOs, four came from the Linux distributors that made up the first generation of open source vendors, and many more would have occurred had the bottom not dropped out of the market. Red Hat, Caldera (SCO Group), and VA Linux (VA Software) made it before the market went belly up, and while the likes of LynuxWorks, Linuxcare and Turbolinux were forced to cancel their IPOs, Turbolinux eventually made it to the Japanese Osaka Securities Exchange in September 2005 after a series of acquisitions. Meanwhile SUSE Linux was of course acquired.

Red Hat - IPO
Caldera - IPO, now operating as SCO (but that's another story)
VA Linux - IPO, now operating as VA Software
LynuxWorks - Cancelled IPO, still private
Linuxcare - Now operating as Levanta, still private
Turbolinux - Acquired twice, and then finally IPO
SUSE Linux - Acquired by Novell

Second generation:
The more vendors you have of course, the fewer have fulfilled an exit strategy, but Marten's argument, if you look at the lists above and below, is that the percentages don't look so bad in context. Trolltech went public in July last year, Mandriva was formed by the acquisitions of Conectiva and Lycoris following Mandrakesoft's IPO, Sourcefire and MySQL are preparing to IPO, and JBoss and Sleepycat were of course acquired.

Trolltech - IPO
Mandrakesoft - IPO
MySQL - Preparing IPO
Sourcefire - Preparing IPO
Conectiva - Acquired by Mandrake
Lycoris - Acquired by Mandriva
JBoss - Acquired by Red Hat
SleepyCat - Acquired by Oracle
Zend - Still private

Third generation:
Here's where it gets tricky as the number of vendors explodes and the arguments will start about which vendors belong in the second or third generation lists. One I would pick out from here is Gluecode, which was acquired by IBM, while Oracle of course bought Innobase. Others that might be heading for acquisition or even IPO in 2007 or 2008 could include XenSource, SugarCRM, Zimbra, Levanta, JasperSoft, Linux Networx, MontaVista... we could be in a for a busy few years.