MPP and Beyond

The last 18 months has seen mega open source projects cashing in like crazy. Now it’s MySQL for 1 Billion. Who could believe it? It’s a great payday for their VC’s and the insiders, but is it good for the peons? Time will tell. All of the major projects related to MPP’s little view of the world are cashing out nicely - ClamAV, Zimbra, MySQL, etc. But who’s next? SpamAssassin was gone long ago, AmavisD is owned by a huge government backed research organization, Postfix is owned by IBM and the other projects that effect us are too broad to be sold, such as Boost. But hell, if you can get 1billion for these projects I can’t imagine that even IBM or the government of Slovenia would snub their noses at the idea of selling. There are no sacred cows in the open source business.

All this activity reverts to old ideas that I have blogged about - open source is a business model for the mega rich. The concept that there is a nice genius in his living room somewhere writing code that we can all use for free is a long dead myth. Certainly many great open source projects are free and help us all avoid buying software while solving problems, but this model is dying faster than HD DVD.

MySQL, company CEO Marten Mickos says that the deal is a huge win for open source. I ask, when will Benchmark Capital open source their bank account? I’ll be the first to download that!

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