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Venture Capitalists Think Open Source Again
prostoalex writes "Seattle PI notices a rise in venture capital investments into open-source companies. JBoss, SourceLabs, SugarCRM and OSDL all attracted venture capital investments this year, with SourceLabs receiving investments from former Senior VP of Microsoft. ""You could say that it is as disruptive as ... mainframes going to PCs or landlines going to cell phones. Software as it has been sold for years is about to be turned on its head completely," says Lucinda Stewart from OVP Venture Partners."
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i use linux and windows oh god how can i have an opinion
I'm all for open source software, to the point of administering a sourceforge project. But. But I cannot think open source is anything to get rich with. Can you run a bussiness ? Sure. Can you make money with it ? Sure. But can you make a lot of money with it ? Hardly.
I guess venture capitalist are using the flawed logic:
1. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, are making gazillions of dollars from software.
2. It seems like Open Source software can replace or at least successfully compete with this behemoths.
3. Somehow, some part of the gazillions of dollars that the aforesaid firms are not going to make, will make it to the Open Source companies.
Point 3 is simply not going to happen. The money will quietly remain in the companies using OSS. They should refocus their strategy and perhaps invest in those companies (the ones heavily using OSS).
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Actually, most likely, tech support. Think about it. If I, as a major corporation, give joe-schmo a copy of an open source app I made to, lets say, track finances, and he starts using it, its doing what he needs, and its tax time, and all of a sudden it stops working, and I don't provide free tech support and he NEEDS it to work, don't you think I'll make a little money (assuming joe-schmo doesn't read code)?
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Agile Artisans
With the advent of FOSS it is much easier to farm out big chunks of developments and take advantage of code already out there. The ability to tap into existing code is something that is much better done at the community level than handled by a few in-house programmers.
This in turn means that companies that are able to do the I/F has a chance of becoming very profitable as it is not easy to do. Notably for domain specific requirements.
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Something I realized awhile ago - and I have been doing very well since - is that open source technologies are not about the software development and software retailing and support processes at ALL. You can make money doing this, but as you mentioned, you won't make a LOT of money. The money isn't going to be in software companies - up until now, the 0 production cost of software after initial R&D is a lisence to print money.
What I realized though was having all this technology around enables companies to apply all sorts of new, "free" technology to solve new problems. Many of the new "free" technologies help a lot of different companies; for example, an inexpensive real time OS is of benefit to many many people. As are machine control libraries, communications libraries, toolkits, etc etc. Do you have any idea how powerful libraries like FFTW are?
All of those pieces can be put together to make new companies possible and existing companies more productive. That's where the gold under the rainbow is for Open Source; commodity software that is in everyone's best interest can be jointly developed, saving thousands and thousands of man hours of duplicated effort.
The only way to compete with third world labour is to increase productivity - and open source technologies can really help here.
And -that- boys and girls is why some savvy venture capitalists are waking up. Finally.
..don't panic
Or giving away the software and selling the hardware to go with it like Digium does with Asterisk. There are several reasonable ways to make money from Open Source software.
But the problem is that all of them basically devalue the software and the work put into developing it in the first place. And it basically makes it impossible to make money as a small software company - you are making money as a support company, or a hardware company, and just using the software as a hook to get people interested in buying. This is a problem because these small software companies have long been where the best jobs for real software developers have been. If everybody is using Open Source software, then the jobs move to being basically plumbing/IT jobs at larger companies, where you are treated like a cog, a commodity.
I do worry sometimes that the overzealousness to make everything Open Source hurts the very programmers who generously contribute their time.
I'm a big fan of Open Source software, and I think there are a lot of exceedingly common problems that ought to have solutions provided by the Open Source community for the benefit of all, and I'm glad they are there. But there is no reason to think that every niche in the software world should or will be filled by Open Source.