bjoernvold.com

The second problem I have with Google is that what they do actively confuses people about Free Software. Google likes to portray itself as an Open Source company and managed to accumulate a lot of geek cred that way (compared to Apple, Amazon or Microsoft). But unfortunately, a lot of people get introduced to Open Source and Free Software via Google. And withholding source code for a while, shipping source code to something similar are close enough to confuse unsuspecting bystanders. And I fear that behavior is doing more harm than good to Free Software.

"growth has reduced some of the advantages of private ownership. By law, certain private companies must report as if they were public companies. The deadline imposed by this requirement accelerated our decision." The SEC filing revealed that Google turned a profit every year since 2001 and earned a profit of $105.6 million on revenues of $961.8 million during 2003.

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Google's initial public offering took place on August 25, 2004. A total of 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 per share. Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as "square root of two" = 1.4142135) (it wouldn't let me use the square root sign without a Sql error here. - D.) were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised US $1.67 billion, and gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.[30] The vast majority of Google's 271 million shares remained under Google's control. Many of Google's employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owns 2.7 million shares of Google.[31]

The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG.