The seven largest Open Source deals ever

A quick list of the largest Open Source deals ever:

Here are the seven largest deals that we could find the numbers for:

1. Sun buys MySQL, $1 billion, 2008
Sun now has their hands on the world’s most widely used open source database.
2. Red Hat buys Cygnus Solutions, $675 million, 1999
Red Hat started the open source acquisition race early when they bought Cygnus Solutions, providers of open source software support.
3. Citrix buys XenSource, $500 million, 2007
Considering how hot virtualization is right now, we can see why Citrix bought XenSource, the company behind the Xen virtualization software.
4. Yahoo buys Zimbra, $350 million, 2007
Yahoo already have their own email services, and with Zimbra they got an integrated email, messaging and collaboration software.
5. Red Hat buys JBoss, $350 million, 2006
Red Hat strengthened their SOA offerings by buying the JBoss Java application server.
6. Novell buys SUSE, $210 million, 2003
Novell got their own Linux distribution by buying SUSE.
7. Nokia buys Trolltech, $153 million, 2008
Trolltech is the company behind the Qt GUI framework which is used by the popular Linux desktop environment KDE.

It’s clear that Open Source acquisitions are accelerating, but it’s interesting to see that #2 happened all the way back in the bubble days of 1999, when Cygnus Solutions went for almost as much as JBoss and Zimbra combined. Suse on the other hand went during the trough of the crash, which comes out in the valuation.

–jeremy