Mike Olson: Intellectual Property for Long Term Growth

I think one of the questions is, is that how you think needs to happen for open source derivative software companies to be standalone, independent? Because historically they've all did the support services model, a lot of distros, they get acquired by you name it, big company, and then the project kind of—

Yeah, look what happened to MySQL, look what happened to Sleepycat. The fact that we The fact that we didn't have a defensible IP strategy meant that at some point we couldn't continue to grow. We would attract low-cost services competition from outside the US, from cheaper geographies, just from people who recognized there was an opportunity to come. We would in some sense create our own competition. I think that the only way to build a long-term independent company is to own proprietary IP. I do think open source is the way that platform software is going to happen. So if you're doing enterprise infrastructure these days and you think you're going to create a proprietary software company, pure play, I tell you I think you're wrong. CIOs want open source infrastructure, they insist on it and the ecosystem is capable of producing it. If you want to build a company that doesn't get acquired by Oracle but that grows up to be a company of that scale, really your only choice is to adopt a hybrid strategy like that. And Red Hat is my favorite example, $1 billion in revenues plus now, right, continued growth driven off of a hybrid strategy that gave them unique value in operating systems and delivering open source to their customers, right. That is our ambition for sure. I think, look, pure-play services-only open source companies can and do get to somewhere between $20 and $50 million in revenues and there are many examples, including our last company, my last company. But for companies to grow past $100 and toward a billion, you must have a more nuanced IP strategy than just we're going to give all our bytes away.