I'm sorry, would like to add a huge example.
"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.
If you will notice, there is nothing "Open Source" in the article, but OpenOffice.org, as partnership with Sun Microsystems. How Open Source is Sun? Who knows.
History of Google
