Open Market

» see openmarket.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Open Market was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in early 1994 by David Gifford and Shikhar Ghosh, at a moment when the question of how anyone would take money over the web had no accepted answer. It went public on the Nasdaq in 1996 under the symbol OMKT, as one of the first ecommerce IPOs, and moved out to Burlington in early 1998.

What it actually sold was infrastructure. The Open Market Web Server was one of the first commercial HTTP servers and the first with a properly scalable threading architecture, and the Secure Web Server variant added S-HTTP and SSL back when which of those would win was still an open question. Transact was the ecommerce product, built around cryptography that produced digital offers and digital receipts with properties a merchant could actually rely on. There was an early offline browser called OM Express and an access-management tool called OM Axcess, and in 1999 the company bought Future Tense to bolt a content management system onto the rest.

It did not hold. By November 1999 Business Week was running a piece titled "Where Is It Now? Open Market's Fall" about a company that had been worth over a billion dollars three years earlier. On 15 August 2001 Open Market signed a merger agreement with divine, inc., Andrew Filipowski's Chicago roll-up, for roughly 44.3 million divine Class A shares, about 59.3 million dollars at divine's closing price the day before. The agreement was amended on 10 September. At a special meeting on 19 October 2001 the stockholders of both companies approved it and the acquisition completed the same day. Three days later Open Market filed a Form 15 with the SEC, deregistering its common stock, and stopped being a company.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the first day ~

The IPO is the number everyone remembers. The stock more than doubled on its first day of trading in May 1996 and ended with a market capitalization of 1.2 billion dollars, for a firm selling web server licenses to corporate IT departments. Venture capitalists were still citing it fifteen years later as the marker for what an early bubble looks like from the inside, because 1996 felt like the top and turned out to be nowhere near it.

The fall took five years and had an ordinary cause. Apache was free and Microsoft was bundling a server into larger deals, and the commercial web server as a standalone product stopped existing as a business. Transact kept Open Market alive longer than the server did, but by 2001 the company was worth a fraction of its opening-day valuation and sold itself for stock in another company.

~ the parts that were sold ~

divine filed for bankruptcy in early 2003, about sixteen months after buying Open Market, and the assets were broken up in the proceedings. Soverain Software took the ecommerce side including Transact and the patent portfolio. FatWire Software took the content management business, extended the Open Market code and kept serving the customers who had bought it. Oracle acquired FatWire in 2011 and the software is now sold as Oracle WebCenter Sites, which makes the 1999 Future Tense acquisition the longest-surviving commercial piece of the whole company.

~ the patents came back ~

Open Market had filed on the online shopping cart in 1994 and on session identifiers and internet credit card payments in 1998. Soverain spent the second half of the 2000s asserting those patents against online retailers, winning settlements from some and a jury verdict against Newegg, which refused to settle. On 22 January 2013 the Federal Circuit reversed, holding the asserted claims obvious over prior art and invalidating them.

So the shopping cart patent, filed the year the company was founded, was finally killed nearly twelve years after the company that filed it had ceased to exist. The last public act of Open Market was losing an appeal it was not around to attend.

~ what i actually use ~

The piece of Open Market still in my working life is the one nobody paid for. The company invented FastCGI and implemented it first in its own web servers, as a way to keep a worker process alive between requests instead of forking a new one for every hit. Every nginx and PHP-FPM configuration I have written since speaks that protocol, and the socket path in the config file is the only trace of the company left on my machine.

The protocol was published rather than sold, and it outlived everything Open Market charged money for. FastCGI has had no owner since 2001, and the specification in use is still the one the company wrote.

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