Open Source Winners: Matt Asay Mostly Admits I'm Right

Before I was a Web 2.0 biographer I had the far less sexy job of writing about open source software for BusinessWeek. (Yeah, this was when Valleywag didn't write about me or my legs.)

Open source is an undoubtedly powerful source in software-- way more so than much ballyhooed software-as-a-service. Name a software giant who hasn't had to respond to the rise of the LAMP stack. But I've become convinced that there will be no real huge public companies to come out of the wave as I argued with Dave Rosenberg on Tech Ticker. (see on the jump)

Yeah, yeah, Dave is starting a company so he has to pretend there's a huge exit. But his long time partner in crime Matt Asay seems to be admitting I'm right. If memory serves, Matt and I have also debated this in the past and he was like "oh no no we're ALL going to be billionaires, Sarah!" He stops short of saying the dream is over, citing Red Hat's Matthew Szulik as a possible billionaire exception had it held out a little longer, the same way Dave says MySQL "could have been" a huge public company had Sun not made such a rich offer.

Whatever. There's no "almost" in Silicon Valley, boys. First of all, if Red Hat couldn't make someone a billionaire, no open source company will, especially since Mozilla is all non-profity. Linux is clearly the biggest success in the open source world. Second, if MySQL had such a great opportunity as an open source company it could have turned down Sun's $1 b. Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo's. Google turned down Yahoo's billions too once upon a time.

Open source = Billion dollar company enabler. Not a trove for VC homeruns by itself.