Linux Magazine’s Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2008
Who knows what the future will hold? Well, heaven knows we don’t or we’d have already won the lottery a few times and retired to a private island somewhere. However, we can look at the past to make a few reasonable predictions– such as the companies in the free and open source software community that are going to have a major impact on the market in 2008.
Last year we tapped Zimbra as one of the Top 20 companies to watch, and that proved to be sage advice — Yahoo! acquired the company midway through 2007 for a staggering $350 million. Pretty nifty for company that made its public debut in October of 2005.
We’re not quite sure how Yahoo! will integrate Zimbra’s technology into its portfolio, but we’re pretty sure that the company didn’t spend $350m to let the open source groupware go stale. It’s encouraging that, upon acquisition, Yahoo! didn’t board up the source code and make Zimbra a proprietary product.
Yahoo! has also been a supporter of open source projects for some time, and has open sourced a bit of its own tools as well. For instance, the company is behind Hadoop! a software platform for writing and running apps that process huge amounts of data.
We also have noticed that, strategy wise, Yahoo! has also been flailing about a bit as of late, but we expect that it will be back on track with a more consistent strategy by the middle of 2008.
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