Venture Firms Warm Up To Open Source, But Questions Remain (Investor's Business Daily)
497190
Investor's Business Daily - When Matrix Partners gave &#36;10 million to open-source software maker JBoss Group last February, some wondered whether the venture capital investors had lost their minds.
542847
Some are questioning the fit between the two companies from the perspective of open-source tools and APIs.
247561
Ziff Davis - Sun's plans to offer Solaris code to the open-source community leaves some analysts scratching their heads.
231804
It seems that the proprietary world is doing just fine in the face of open source.  But for how long?
325391
At work we're mostly an OSS shop.  Partly because I have a strong bias towards OSS but cost, reliability, security, etc are all leading factors.  For the last several months now I've been in an interesting position to prove the benefits of OSS in a real-world environment.  We've had to extend a number of OSS tools to fit into our production environment.  These are significant additions and non-trivial.  Open Source allows you to STAND on the shoulders of gods.  For example we've been having a problem with the Jakarta DBCP  connection pool.  It was running out of connections in highly threaded environments and is slow.  Certainly slower than would be necessary.  Long story short.  Last night  ...
60496
As companies ramp up open-source deployments, expertise is in high demand and short supply. The costs of developing talent can add up.
711669
One of the proverbial back stories of IT operations has always been the battle between the "suits" and the "techies." From the techie point of view, the hapless but disturbingly powerful suits are the business guys who put more thought into picking out hundred-dollar silk ties at Nordstrom than they put into million-dollar IT decisions. Worse, the suits gravitate towards outsourcing and service firms that implement big-dollar solutions. Many techies start on the other end of the spectrum with free open source solutions that reflect a substantial DIY ethic. Will the twain ever meet?
343325
Still in stealth mode, a company looks to use open source to make it easier to build social applications on the Web.
442401
It's a benefit to the investors (and, by the way, to the companies seeking venture capital) to have VC Fund performance out in the open (''State discloses venture results,&quot; Aug. 25).
9277
TechWeb - Acquisition lets vendor plug hole in product line and dig deeper into open source market.
4733
While Google Inc.&#39;s auction-based initial public offering may not spur a wave of copycats, venture capitalists are sorting through the IPO to see what can be learned for future deals.
16286
As open source becomes pervasive, software giants like Microsoft, Oracle and Sun are adapting in different ways.
462982
Investor's Business Daily - Predictable may be boring, but it&#39;s preferred by Janus Enterprise Fund.
571713
Investor's Business Daily - Recent data suggest the game is over in the Web-based social networking field, but that isn&#39;t stopping new new players from joining in.
711054
By Corilyn Shropshire, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette  Sep. 2--The identities of Pittsburgh tech startups that have secured  investment dollars, both from private "angels" and venture capitalists, is  slowly trickling out.
368060
The Story: What?s in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was ?liberal.? And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is ?commercial.?[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    No matter what you call them, open source companies have been steadily integrating parts of the hated commercial software subscription model into their business. First it was support, and now it is software access. Say it ain?t so, Linus.MySQL, for example, will charge users of its enterprise edition to use the code, not just for support as has been the traditional open source business model. ?We are looking for ways to extend our offerings in a way that can be monetized,? bluntly says Kaj Arno, the company?s VP for community.Chander Kant, founder of the open source storage software company Zmanda, is likewise frank about the need to drive revenue. Speaking of the open source community as a whole, he says, ?We are not a charity. We need to monetize.?Recognizing that charging to use open source software flies in the face of the original open source premise of freely sharable code open to everyone, Arno is quick to note that the paid version of Workbench has code and features not found in the free version ? and that the free version ?is not crippled.? Arno calls the move an experiment, and acknowledges that MySQL needs to move carefully to avoid upsetting the often quick-tempered open source community.Is this a trend? Red Monk analyst Stephen O?Grady says it is: ?Ultimately when you look at a high-profile firm like MySQL embracing it, it?s difficult to conclude anything else.?InfoWorld blogger (and IBM employee) Savio Rodrigues notes another example. In a recent blog post, he looked at changes to JBoss since it was purchased by Red Hat Software and concluded: ?The Fedora/JBoss subscription is just like the software subscription business model that commercial software vendors have been using for decades.?Does that mean a company that adopts the usage-based pricing model isn?t really open-source? That?s an interesting point, since as Zmanda?s Kant acknowledges, ?the litmus test of open source is control of the code.? Open source software delivered through appliances keeps the access ? and thus control ? away from users, he notes. But code binaries distributed as software remain open to their users ? for now, at least.The Bottom Line: Have MySQL and Red Hat run away from the principles of open source? Who cares. The real point is that the open source business model is evolving away from the ?free? model and toward an alternative development approach for commercial software. If you adopted open source due to its cost, you may not save as much as you thought. If you adopted open source for the access to source code or the community-supported development approach that is supposed to result in better software, it?s not yet clear if the greater commercialization will enhance those aspects or drive away the true believers and make open source no different than the old-fashioned commercial offerings.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
68730
Today, Seesmic, the company founded by Loic Lemeur, announced their initial $6 million funding. Several people noticed that my name isn't on the list of investors.  I'll probably end up kicking myself when Seesmic becomes the next Google or YouTube. I remain a fan of the company and Loic and his team and will be rooting for them.  Why did I get cold feet? It has nothing to do with the product or the company, both of which appear to be outstanding. It's the stock market. I had to make the final Seesmic decision as I was getting out of stock, at a significant loss. The only stock I hold now is AAPL, and sadly, it's way under the price I paid for it a few months ago. Like a lot of other investors, right now stocks give me the willies. I will likely get back in, slowly, a little bit every week to average out the price, hoping the market has found a bottom.