I spent part of yesterday attending the Open Source Summit at Portland’s Innotech Business and Technology Conference, and moderating a panel on ‘IT Giants and Open Source.’ We had a great discussion about the reasons, roles, responsibilities and rewards for big vendors to be acutely and adequately participating in open source software development and commercialization. […]

“Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL” screamed the headline on Slashdot last night. The headline is not entirely accurate (although slightly more accurate than the bizarre statement that “Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything”).
So what is going on at MySQL? To get to the bottom of that you have […]

While this year’s OSBC event has actually started yet, the big news on day one looks set to be EnterpriseDB’s announcement that IBM has joined existing investors in a $10m Series C funding round (EnterpriseDB also announced its new Postgres Plus strategy and the open sourcing of GridSQL).
IBM’s investment in EnterpriseDB is particularly fascinating given […]

In his recent Forbes article Cash Me Out (by way of The Register’s Open Season) Dan Lyons likens the assimilation of open source into the mainstream IT industry to the incorporation of gay culture into mainstream culture.
In his article, Lyons references The End of Gay Culture, an essay written by Andrew Sullivan and published in […]

I’m still kicking around the ideas suggested by Tim Bowden’s post, which suggested that the GPL is a better licensing choice than BSD for vendors establishing commercial dominance around an open source project.
If you were to draw up a list of the most successful commercial open source vendors, I believe they would all be based […]

Matt Asay has the news that IBM has taken the decision to discontinue the development of the solidDB for MySQL database engine following its acquisition of in-memory database specialist Solid Information Technology. The official announcement is here on SourceForge.
As Dhiren Patel, community relations manager writes: “This in-memory technology, and not Solid’s open source offering, […]

Given Jonathan Schwartz’s proclamation that Sun will make further open source acquisitions, I’ve been putting some thought into likely targets and/or new directions opened up by the MySQL acquisitions. One likely target sector is the ecosystem of vendors that surround the MySQL database - such as clustering and HA software providers - as well as […]

Tim Bowden published an interesting post earlier this week about the impact that the choice of open source license has on the potential valuation of an open source vendor. Taking the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases as an example, Bowden wrote:
“When it comes to takeovers and valuations, I think the role of GPL as a strategic […]

Novell has announced that it has acquired open source collaboration software vendor SiteScape for an undisclosed fee, adding team workspace and collaboration functionality to its collaboration software portfolio. The main question the deal raised for me is why it took so long. Novell announced an OEM relationship with SiteScape almost exactly a year ago but […]

When Citrix announced its acquisition of XenSource in August 2007, 451 CAOS Theory argued that the huge multiple being paid had little or nothing to do with open source. “While this is exciting news for the XenSource founders, I don’t think the open source vendor community should get caught up in this excitement. It wasn’t […]

It’s good to see MySQL’s CEO, Marten Mickos, explaining his reasons for abandoning the company’s IPO in favor of being acquired by Sun. What made him and the open source database company’s top brass change their minds (apart from $1bn)? Mickos lists ten factors that convinced him that Sun was the better option:
“1. Jonathan Schwartz […]

It’s good to see I’m not the only person concerned about Zimbra’s future in a world where Microsoft owns Yahoo. In fact, the open source collaboration firm offered a timely reminder that it is part of the Yahoo empire with version 5.0 of its Collaboration Suite, prompting many more people to wonder about the project’s […]

Or indeed, wither Zimbra? Microsoft has officially launched its acquisition bid for Yahoo for $31 per share, valuing the company at $44.6bn (you can read the offer letter here). It’s a sign of my open source-focused view of the world (and the fact that I was using the software at the time I heard the […]

What links JBoss, XenSource, Zimbra and MySQL (aside from the fact that they were all acquired for large amounts of money)? Peter Fenton and/or Benchmark Capital.
UPDATE This post corrects a couple of mistakes in the original version. UPDATE
Fenton made his investments in JBoss, Zimbra and XenSource while at Accel. Benchmark also invested in Zimbra, via […]

The rate of open source M&A continues apace, this time involving two open source software vendors. SpringSource has announced plans to acquire Covalent Technologies for an undisclosed fee. At first glance the deal makes a lot of sense as it marries SpringSource’s Spring Framework-related products and services with the Apache support and services offered by […]

Yet another open source acquisition. This time it is mobile device vendor Nokia stepping up to the plate with its purchase of open source development tools vendor Trolltech. Nokia will offer NOK 16 is cash for Trolltech, which values the firm at roughly $153m (taking into account currency conversion and rounding).
Trolltech hadn’t yet announced its […]

“2008 is starting with a bang for open source,” wrote Mark Radcliffe last week, and he’s not wrong. Not only did we see Sun’s $1bn acquisition of MySQL, but we’ve also seen an extraordinary amount of venture capital funding. Today saw no fewer than three investments announced, with Greenplum landing $27m Series C, Zenoss closing […]

Since Sun announced its acquisition of MySQL for $1bn, there have been some suggestions that perhaps Sun paying too much for the open source database vendor. Calculating the multiple for MySQL has proved difficult because there are no official figures to go on, and also because many of the unofficial figures that are floating around […]

As Mark Hinkle has already noted, The 451 Group recently published a brief on open source mergers and acquisitions, written by open source research director, Raven Zachary, and financial analyst Brenon Daly. It is a happy coincidence that the report was published the day before Sun announced its acquisition of MySQL.
Clearly the report does not […]

Following on from my instant reaction to the news that Sun was acquiring MySQL for $1bn, the deal deserves some closer attention. Subscribers to The 451 Group’s TechDealMaker service can read the QuickTake and the full Deal Analysis, while a couple of points are worthy of further analysis:

Despite the best efforts of MySQL and other […]