[lbo-talk] MySQL to go public

[Colin Brace]

On 1/31/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:

> Web 2.0 has come with Bubble 2.0. It's a lot less dramatic than the
> first, but no one still has any damned idea how YouTube is going to
> make a buck.

It is probably my fault for putting "IPO" in the subject line, but
conflating dot.com bubbles and open source software development is
just plain wrong.

I don't know enough about the company MySQL ABB to be able to form an
opinion as to whether or not it should turn to the stock market for
capitalization but even a cursory glance at the story should make
evident that this is not some jazzy "Web 2.0" startup built largely on
air, but an established company that develops a rather boring product,
a database system, which just happens to serve as a platform for a
bazillion or so websites, including some really huge ones like
Wikipedia. It appears to have a genuine revenue stream, ten thousand
or so companies which pay a few thousand dollars a year for support.

What is so flaky about this? Where is the bubble? Red Hat, another
open source software company, had an IPO during the dot.com era and it
is still in business, flourishing even; it makes money and also
returns something to the community in the form of improvements to
Linux which anyone is free to use (and many do). As a whole, the OSS
community is partly driven by volunteers, which may limit its
applicability to the wider world, but neither is it solely the
province of pimply geeks living in their parents' basements.

I realize that software development is but a small part of total US
economy, and one simply cannot apply the open source model to a
business like WalMart. But it is nonetheless worth studying because it
tempers one of the most egregious aspect of contemporary capitalism,
and that is the stranglehold a few powerful corporations have in
markets they dominate. A company like Red Hat can make lots of dough
selling its services, but if ever it were to claim proprietary
interest in the source code and/or make decisions that weren't in the
public good (alas rather narrowly defined in this context), people
could and would quickly jump ship. This issue is all the more germane
given the truly onerous Digital RIghts Management (DRM) features of
Vista, which are described in all their gory detail in the article
which Dwayne alluded to in another thread earlier today.

It is not going to happen anytime soon, but imagine the it was decreed
in the US that all electronic voting systems should be open-source.
Diebold et al would scream bloody murder, but we can now point to
evidence that can be a viable economic model. They could make money
while answering to the greater public good, i.e., transparency.

Instead of making snarky comments about free toasters and other
ephemera, I would hope the lefties on this list would take a closer
look at OSS as being an useful example of how economic life can be
organized (slightly) differently. But few people here seem to "get
it", Dwayne, Ravi, maybe others, and of course Chuck, who rightly
recognizes in it aspects of anarchism.

-- 
  Colin Brace
  Amsterdam