The Open Road

Initially, it appeared that every successful open-source company would be swallowed up through acquisition. That may still happen, but as the mergers and acquisitions route dries up, it's increasingly likely that the best open-source companies could find themselves growing toward an initial public offering.

After all, they may not have any other choice.

JBoss, Zimbra, XenSource, and other companies rode an initial surge in interest in open source as a business and development strategy, each selling for hundreds of millions of dollars. Since that time the pace of acquisitions has slowed as would-be buyers hunker down and ride out the recession.

At the same time, open-source companies are reporting record revenue. My own company, Alfresco, has recorded 17 straight growth quarters since the company was founded in 2005, and we're joined by Funambol, Jaspersoft, and others that are reporting upward of 100 percent growth quarter over quarter.

Where does such sales momentum lead? Probably not to acquisitions. Not for many of these companies.

It's likely that within the next few years, the M&A market will open up again. But by that time many of these open-source companies will likely have attained a size that makes it easier for them to go public than to be acquired.

MySQL, which was topping $94 million in sales at the time of its $1 billion acquisition by Sun, is the exception to this rule. There simply aren't very many companies that can afford to spend $1 billion on an acquisition, which means that open-source companies will need to focus on being built to last, not built to flip.

Perhaps this won't sound appealing to the employees of Reductive Labs, Funambol, Pentaho, and other open-source companies. Like their Web 2.0 peers, they almost certainly would love to see a quick exit so that they can buy a cabin up in Tahoe.

But though it may not be ideal for such employees, it's arguably a very good thing for the industry, and for IT buyers. The industry could use another Red Hat. IT buyers, for their parts, would probably love to be able to buy from someone other than Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft.

So settle in for the mid-term march to profitable $100 million open-source companies. At current growth rates, we should start to see IPO action as early as 2012, and perhaps sooner.

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See John Mark Walker's bio below.

Quick, what were you doing on December 9, 1999? If you actually remember, then there's a good chance that you're an old-school Linux type. If you don't have any idea, then read on, and you'll discover what you missed.

I'll never forget where I was--at ground zero of the apex of dot-com ridiculousness. While I and all of my co-workers were in the office that day, about the only thing we accomplished was writing 15 gazillion Perl-based variations on the theme of stock tickers that displayed the price of LNUX, updated at regular intervals. Well, that and drinking champagne. Words cannot adequately express what it's like to look around the office and know that everyone in the building is a newly minted millionaire--on paper, at least.

Ten years ago today, shares of LNUX, the Nasdaq symbol for VA Linux Systems, went on sale to the eagerly awaiting public. You may recall that VA Linux Systems was the company that combined Linux, open-source software, and Intel-based hardware. Just six months prior to VA's initial public offering, Red Hat Software had gone public with a very successful IPO.

We were in the middle of the open-source pixie dust revolution, when many flagging companies jumped on the open-source bandwagon in a desperate attempt to recapture past magic. It was this phenomenon that led to the general conflation of the late-1990s open-source boom with the dot-com bubble, and it would be a few years before most industry analysts, pundits, and beat reporters figured out that there was a difference.

But back to IPO day. I strolled into work sometime after 9:30 that morning and was immediately greeted by Pay, my manager, with some astounding news. We all guessed that the day would be significant, but none of us were prepared for the tsunami of blissful, surreal numbness rushing to greet us.

He showed me a sheet of paper faxed that morning from the investment bank's office (truly ground zero on that day), that was copied ad nauseum and shoved into disbelieving faces. I'll never forget what was on it: just a simple table with 2 columns. The column on the left was a list of investors, and the column on the right was the price they bid for our stock. The numbers were astronomical: $320, $250, $200, $300, $290.

Curiously, some investor didn't get the memo and bid a paltry $50. We laughed at that because it was really funny--at the time. A year later, and I would recall that lone investor for an entirely different reason: on December 8, 2000, LNUX closed the day at $8.49.

On IPO day, we could all do the math, and on that day, the math was in our favor. The official IPO price was $30, and most of us owned options on shares with a much lower strike price. We had all won the lottery, hit the jackpot, (insert gambling metaphor here). Or so we thought. What actually happened was, as Don Marti so artfully described it, we had all become players in a game none of us truly understood.

To this day, the VA Linux IPO remains the Nasdaq's most successful, in terms of its first-day gain, but what does that success really mean, in the context of events that have taken place since? At the time, the LNUX IPO was lumped in with the rest of dot-com mania and treated as the poster child for the insanity that gripped the market.

The New York Times summed up that view best with its report on the IPO, "A Tiny Company with Dim Prospects Goes Public with a Bang." (Note: the Times has since changed the headline, but we remember the original.)

You'll be unsurprised to know that we viewed things slightly differently. But as the stock price plummeted, we went from a sign of the audacity of the times to a symbol of wasted effort, a gloomy future, and everything that was wrong with the go-go '90s. We were somehow expected to repent for the misdeeds of others.

It is simply wrong to view VA Linux as a dot-com vehicle or to attach a greater symbolism to its downfall. It was really neither; it was simply the dramatic rise and fall of a company that overreached. It was a real company that made real things and believed very strongly that open source was going to be a major component of IT very soon.

That we executed poorly and paid dearly for it does not diminish the original ideas behind the company. While VA was not profitable after the IPO, it was certainly not because of revenue. In fact, revenue growth was strong, but our unrealistic growth plan--to become Dell in less than two years--did us in. Only the convenience of timing allows VA Linux Systems to be mentioned in the same breath as eToys, Pets.com or Webvan. The revenue of those was rather paltry, in comparison.

To put the VA Linux IPO in its proper context, let's rewind and remember what was going on at the time:

• Red Hat had a great IPO the summer of 1999.
• IBM had jumped into bed with Apache and had started its first big push with Linux.
• Oracle and most other major database players had released native versions for Linux.
• A year earlier, Dan Kusnetzky famously authored the famous IDC report showing explosive Linux growth of 212 percent.

And yet, in spite of these obvious signs of traction and increasing market share with real customer demand, Linux and the rest of the open-source "bandwagon" were treated like Summer of Love refuse that had never really come down from the acid hits.

Every article about Linux included (stupid, irrelevant) questions about whether it would replace Windows 98. There was a widespread belief among industry observers that open source was fueled by the dot-com bubble and would wither away when the bubble burst. Every article referenced a ragged band of hippie programmers who did it out of love or ideology and just wanted to beat the evil empire.

At that time, no one had really figured out what was driving open-source development. It's worth pointing out that we card-carrying members of "the" open-source community played our part in that perception. Who can forget the famous Windows Refund Day? And if you never smelled Richard Stallman or Eric Raymond at a conference, then you clearly missed out.

It was a heady time of uncertainty, doubt, and eternal optimism. A time of green-field bliss, of "Linux without limits," and there was no problem that a few lines of Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) couldn't solve. After all, "the geek shall inherit the earth." It must be true; I read it on a T-shirt.

It truly was a time of the almighty individual weaving his magic and changing the world--and if you were lucky, getting paid well for it. We were young and naive, and those of us endowed with Y chromosomes were high on testosterone. We truly believed that we were on the right side of history but were too stupid to realize our own limitations. This was a blessing and a curse.

That unyielding belief in the omnipotence of writing code gave our army the energy to slay dragons we wouldn't have otherwise, but it also gave us the chutzpah to tackle issues that we ultimately could not solve. Case in point: that time when someone who shall remain anonymous tried to rewrite our ERP system from scratch. In Perl. He didn't last very long.

As it turns out, we were right about the open-source thing, but we somehow forgot the other history lesson: the one about how being on the leading edge of something successful doesn't mean you'll enjoy all, most, or indeed, any success. Those who ultimately reaped the benefits of open-source proliferation did so because they were smarter and took a more conservative approach.

The 10th anniversary of Red Hat's IPO passed without much fanfare last summer, probably because its management is too busy running a successful company to really take the time to pause and reflect. VA Linux Systems, meanwhile, was devastated by the tech bust because those start-up companies were a significant percentage or our revenue.

VA Linux Ssytems changed its name in 2001 to VA Software, after jettisoning the hardware business entirely, and it focused on selling licenses for SourceForge Enterprise. And when that didn't work out, it became SourceForge, a collection of Web sites deriving revenue entirely from ad sales. And it has since changed its name again, to Geeknet.

For the veterans of the VA Linux IPO, we're left to ponder what might have been and savor the unreal moments, while deriving some small consolation from the fact that our instincts were right: open source was not a fad; it was just the beginning. It's not going away, and VA Linux was ahead of its time. Small consolation, indeed.

Ten years ago today, on August 11, 1999, Red Hat saw its shares triple in an initial public offering that ushered in a new era of commercial open-source prosperity.

Iain Gray, then a Sun employee and now Red Hat's vice president of Global Support, writes nostalgically: "I remember sitting in the Sun office in UK watching the stock skyrocket, thinking the world had gone mad."

Indeed it had. Soon Red Hat's stock was to plummet to earth but not before the company learned a valuable lesson: there must be more than hype to make open source grow.

Red Hat's S-1, the document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission registering its intent to sell its shares on the public market, was filled with desire to use the IPO cash to improve its brand, expand professional services, and to improve its Web site to "create the definitive online destination for the open source community."

Very little attention was paid to the nuts and bolts of actually making money. In fact, as LWN.net pointed out back in 1999, "Nowhere in the [S-1] filing is anything about 'make more money selling our distribution.' Red Hat clearly sees its future elsewhere."

Not for long. Whatever Red Hat's vision of its business model in 1999, it soon realized that it needed to spin value far beyond a strong brand. The company recognized in its S-1 filing that "if faster Internet connections become widely available, more users may download the distribution from the net, and fewer will buy it."

That worry absolutely proved to be true, leading Red Hat to introduce (the initially proprietary) Red Hat Network in 2000 and in March 2002 upped the ante with Advanced Server, which later became Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Over the past 10 years, Red Hat has maintained its investment in strong branding, but has focused even more on its core distribution and the value therein, investing more than $100 million each year to improve Linux and its distribution thereof.

The results speak for themselves. Red Hat demonstrated that anyone can be rich for a day with a hype-based IPO launch, but it has more importantly proved that there's a whole lot of substance to open source over the past 10 years. Red Hat has made a massive impact on the software industry, not the least being making open source palatable to the enterprise buyer, to the extent that now open-source competitors are giving Red Hat a run for its money.

There could be no better testament to Red Hat's influence and importance.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

I had nearly overlooked the fact that Red Hat went public nine years ago on August 11, 1999 with one of the top-ten single biggest gains in Wall Street history. Impressive.

And yet those stock gains weren't to last.

What did endure, however, was Red Hat's commitment to open source. Nine years later, Red Hat has yet to reach $1 billion in sales, but it gets closer each year and has provided cover for a wide array of open-source startups aiming to get funded as the "Red Hat of [insert application category]." Cumulatively, Red Hat has delivered over $1.85 billion in revenue since 1999 according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

While I'm grateful to an array of vendors for proving out the open-source opportunity, including JBoss, Novell, MySQL, Zimbra, and others, I'm most grateful to Red Hat for sticking it out and demonstrating that superior value can be delivered at lower cost through open source.

Thanks, Red Hat, for becoming more than just a hot IPO.

Remember 1999? Back then investors were throwing money at anything that moved and, in the case of Linuxcare, they were also throwing money at things that could barely manage a crawl. Open-source vendors VA Linux and Red Hat enjoyed massive IPOs...IPOs that quickly fell back to earth.

Linuxcare never made it that far, opting to pull its IPO, replace its CEO, and fire much of its staff.

Before we got to that point, however, someone came up with this lovely Linuxcare pre-IPO poster to celebrate, however. I had a hard time getting a good picture of it (and it was too big to scan in), but it does a great job of describing the tenor of the time, showing who the movers and shakers (and shaken) of the time were:

The Wall Street Journal recently asked a highly poignant question: "Who's going to fund the next Steve Jobs?" The Journal asks the question in light of a startling piece of trivia: The second quarter of 2008 marked the first time in 30 years that no venture-backed companies went public. Not a single one.

Why? Through punitive regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, we may have dried up the appetite for public exits, given that a private buyer means less red tape:

This is bad news for the U.S. economy. Does anyone think that we would be better off if Bill Gates and Michael Dell had sold out to corporate behemoths early in their careers, instead of leading their firms for years as public companies? Would consumers enjoy the same vibrant market in Web services if Yahoo had gobbled up a nascent Google? How powerful would our computers be if Intel had become an IBM subsidiary, instead of going public in 1971?...

... Read more

I found Fortune's article on the top IPOs to watch for in 2008 to be fascinating, but Matthew Aslett's analysis even better. The shocking thing in Fortune's article is that open source or open-source related companies account for four of the five listed.

It's nothing less than shocking.

It means that for all the bluster of open source being inimical to profit, the inverse is true. Giving one's product away to achieve abundance/ubiquity turns out to be a winning business model. For example, my Alfresco sales team is now routinely closing six-figure deals...over email and the phone...with less than five years of sales experience (and often much less). The seven-figure deals still often require a visit. But the cost of sale is still anemic compared to the proprietary world.

Techcrunch notes that the rumor mill is heating up on an imminent IPO from MySQL:

I am hearing chatter from hedge fund circles that the filing may be imminent. Last I checked, nothing has been filed with the SEC yet.

All quiet on the western front, but with growing market share (25% by Evans Data's estimates) and an increasing ability to monetize that usage MySQL may well be ready to put itself in the public eye. This would be a major coup for the company, obviously, but also for open source, generally. Frankly said, we need more monetary proof points that open source offers sustainable revenue models.