O'Reilly: Open Source IPOs Aug 5, 1999, 13 :22 UTC (3 Talkback[s]) (5346 reads) (Other stories by Tim O'Reilly) (As seen on Slashdot)
"The arrival of your invitation to the Open Source Conference
encouraged me to follow through on a question that's been nagging at
me since I read of Red Hat's going public... I follow with much interest
the open source "movement"--and this development seems real
significant to me. How do you see Red Hat's going public (and I hear
that Caldera is contemplating it too) contributing to this--is it
enhancing the progress by adding resources (and notoriety not yet
seen for this company by the general populace)? Do you see involving
"equity owners" an evolutionary step that will facilitate the betterment of
the whole movement? I know competition is good, but is there a threat
of splintering this 'movement' if one company gets the upper hand ?"
"Boy, this is a tough question. I don't think any of us knows the answer.
Big money could distort the open source market in a significant way. It
sure did that to the Internet standards process... Companies like
Netscape (and then Microsoft) turned HTML and friends into a
battleground, to the detriment of users. The only thing that protected
protocols like HTTP and SMTP was the presence of open source
implementations (Apache and Sendmail) with dominant market share. As
that kind of thing goes by the way side, we could see some major
fragmentation. And it is certainly true that if a company like Sendmail,
Inc. is acquired or fails to meet its financial targets in ways that give
control to the financiers rather than the hackers, that bastion of
standards could certainly be undercut. (To be honest, though, there
wasn't much choice, since without funding, sendmail's dominance would
likely have fallen by the wayside as companies like Microsoft aimed
squarely at the internet email server market.)"
