Thursday, January 22, 2009

Opening up of M & A in Open Source space

It is interesting to analyze M & A activity for open source products. Conventional approach of business valuation will not work. Why? Even for the most popular open source products do we know the customer individually. Well it is very limited view. How do we evaluate the brand value? How to measure the worth of the intellectual property? Many such aspects can not be adequately answered.

One solution to the problem is to treat it like stock market. You do not know where the stock price will head tomorrow. You can only speculate. So we fix the margin we want to make and then evaluate if the stock is worth it or not. Apply the same principle. Rather that trying to find the worth of the product it is easier to fix the target. So question which should be asked is how much money we want to make from the acquisition and does the intrinsic value of the product matches that.

But irrespective of how you define the rules of game, lot of traction may be seen this year.

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