Isn’t it almost always much better in acquisitions that the acquired company owns all of their code? I have been told so many times. Apparently the valuation is significantly impacted if they do not.
My Director of Development once explained to me that our company rented all its offices; that its only assets (other than people) was its code; and people can leave. He was scrupulous about keeping GPL out of the codebase.
Companies use tons of open source code, it isn’t any different than that. And in many cases, these were huge companies, not startups. It was a shortcut to reimplementing the same code. No valuation impact.
