Let the open source IPO market begin in earnest! With MySQL gearing up for an IPO, and this Sourcefire offering set to go [PDF], life continues to look good for open source exits. Sourcefire is issuing 5,770,000 shares at the price of $15 (which I'm hearing floating around) at a $350M valuation. Not bad.
But one thing that has me concerned is how Sourcefire apparently treats open source. LIke something to be exploited, but not replenished and fed. (I stress "apparently" because it may well be that the company does a wide range of things for the community. I'm just going off the prospectus.)
In the prospectus, Sourcefire cites the open source community as one of its primary strengths:
The Snort user community, with over 100,000 registered users and over 3 million downloads to date, has enabled us to …
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