SourceFire circa 2002, purveyors of Snort via OSS and hardware appliance, now IPO'd? Not a startup.
Sleepycat software, purveyors of Berkeley DB under dual GPL and commercial license, acquired by Oracle? Not a startup.
Splunk, purveyors of Splunk, open source core and proprietary commercial extensions, with over 20MM in VC funding? Not a startup.
Hyperic, purveyors of Hyperic, which is OSS end-to-end, with a 6MM B from Accel? Not a startup.
Zimbra, purveyors of OSS Exchange clone Zimbra, acquired by Yahoo!? Not a startup.
Astaro, purveyors of one of the top 5 "UTM" (IPS+firewall) boxes, now profitable? Not a startup.
None of these companies are services businesses.
Your characterization of MySQL is laughable, too. The "cheap advertising version of MySQL" you mention accounts for 99% of the real-world usage of MySQL in the marketplace, and anybody on Hacker News wishes they had the market power MySQL did.
So, my response to you: name an equivalent number of companies any of us has heard of with an open-source product that is services-driven that isn't Red Hat or IBM.
Sleepycat software, purveyors of Berkeley DB under dual GPL and commercial license, acquired by Oracle? Not a startup.
Splunk, purveyors of Splunk, open source core and proprietary commercial extensions, with over 20MM in VC funding? Not a startup.
Hyperic, purveyors of Hyperic, which is OSS end-to-end, with a 6MM B from Accel? Not a startup.
Zimbra, purveyors of OSS Exchange clone Zimbra, acquired by Yahoo!? Not a startup.
Astaro, purveyors of one of the top 5 "UTM" (IPS+firewall) boxes, now profitable? Not a startup.
None of these companies are services businesses.
Your characterization of MySQL is laughable, too. The "cheap advertising version of MySQL" you mention accounts for 99% of the real-world usage of MySQL in the marketplace, and anybody on Hacker News wishes they had the market power MySQL did.
So, my response to you: name an equivalent number of companies any of us has heard of with an open-source product that is services-driven that isn't Red Hat or IBM.