Slashdot Mirror
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."
"Software as it has been sold for years is about to be turned on its head completely," says Lucinda Stewart from OVP Venture Partners.""
And that will be a damn good thing. Perhaps things might get turned to a user license instead of a single user/mahcine licnse. How about resonable prices? How about companies standing behind their work because there is actual competetition in the market.
It's really a great idea that little people realise in that a product itself relatively costs nothing and supporting it and/or releasing hardware for it is where all the bucks are. :-)
That' funny... I've made some real money on open source investing. I bought SCO when it blew up on slashdot, followed it up, sold just over the peak and shorted it down. So there is money to be made on open source - shorting the stocks of the losers. My current investment tips (courtesy slashdot): short Sun.
But I just can't read this post. There are 5, an odd number, of quotation marks. How are these supposed to line up?
... 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."
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
The programmer in me looks at this with parsing in mind and goes nuts.
I think either the second one is extra or the editor added a final article quote, but kept the text italics and addeed a final quotation mark for good measure.
Wheeeee
I think money can still be made with something like Caucho's developer source license.
It's not BSD or GPL, but it does allow you a lot more freedom than completely closed source solutions do. The only caveat I see is that, unless you work for the company, you aren't getting CVS access.
However, it allows the people who work on the software to be compensated.
I've noticed an increased number of Open Source products in verticle market niches(i.e. specialized accounting packages). I can easily imagine that if some of the larger customers would band together and chance their purchasing practices we'd see dramatic change here rapidly. For example, i work with a large public school district. They've had closed source vendors that simply became unable to support their products any longer(basically the folks that understood the product refused to work with the closed source vendor management). Now, the bulk of money flowing into that closed source vendor was taxpayer money. If the school districts had insisted on Open Source up front, it might have cost a bit more money-but it would have saved a lot of hassle down the road.
One way this might be done is for large public agencies to pool their purchasing decisions. Basically they would agree to a large purchase from a vendor on condition the source be open.
no, he's going to say screw you and find something else, maybe from someone else giving the software out for free.
Basing things on support is horrible. A good peice of software won't need support. If someone has to call you to figure out how to work it, then the software has a problem.
There is probably some forms of support that work, maybe you give the app away for free, but you charge for plugin that add features, or there is some prescription for an aspect of it, like you pay to have the program get feed info all the time (like a tivo like app, or a weather program would need).
But in the end support fails on these ones to, because someone else won't have any intention of being a business, they will just be making something and giving every aspect of it away, and doesn't need support. At that point no free software business model will work.
Pay software will survive though. For one there is less diversity, thus more people using the same app which makes person to person (friends) support work better, and just nice to know that a big chunk of the world is using the same as you, so you get things like "oh hey, my bank lets me download my statements in the format my app uses". Also when something goes wrong with it, there is someone to hold responsible.
People want to buy stuff from solid companies that they know of, and can feel certain that company will be around. Free software doesn't give that. Redhat is probably the most solid company out there for this, and few outside the linux world have ever heard of them, and even then no one looks at them as a company they know for certain will be around even 3 years from now.
no, he's going to say screw you and find something else, maybe from someone else giving the software out for free.
Not if he already paid for the support or a warranty.
Basing things on support is horrible. A good peice of software won't need support. If someone has to call you to figure out how to work it, then the software has a problem.
Really? Perfect software won't need support. If your statement is correct there is no good software available today.
There is probably some forms of support that work, maybe you give the app away for free, but you charge for plugin that add features, or there is some prescription for an aspect of it, like you pay to have the program get feed info all the time (like a tivo like app, or a weather program would need).
Are you sure you really understand what free in free software stands for. The above example is how freeware works.
But in the end support fails on these ones to, because someone else won't have any intention of being a business, they will just be making something and giving every aspect of it away, and doesn't need support. At that point no free software business model will work.
as would any software business model.
Pay software will survive though. For one there is less diversity, thus more people using the same app which makes person to person (friends) support work better, and just nice to know that a big chunk of the world is using the same as you, so you get things like "oh hey, my bank lets me download my statements in the format my app uses".
Also known as standardization.
Also when something goes wrong with it, there is someone to hold responsible.
Also known as a warranty.
People want to buy stuff from solid companies that they know of, and can feel certain that company will be around.
Such as IBM or Sun...
But maybe you just confuse free beer with free speech. In that case disregard my post and go visit Free Software Foundation
Evolution is just a scientific theory. Creationism is not.
Indeed you are not going to make money on selling the program or license costs. However, there is good money to be made in consultancy.
Consider all these big firms like SAP, when their market matures and most of their money starts to come from existing licenses instead of new sales, they invariably try to expand/develop their consultancy side (anoying their former consultancy partners).
So basically an OSS firm skips the initial phase where they get their income from product sales, but they may still be a viable consultancy company, especially if they can capture a large part of the market.
Personally I don't value consultancy firms all that high. Basically they sell hours, and you can sell an hour only once, so your income is limited by the numer of consultants you have (if you have a consultant that is very popular you can't burn other copies of him/her and sell those too). So in that sense I think these OSS firms are probably less desirable to investors.
Whats CSDS - Collaborative Software Development System. The most significat Open Source project out there is probably Collabnet although many don't know what it is, many have used it. If you downloaded netbeans, Open Office or checked out subversion (tigris.org), you've used it.
:]
Their product is built on the premis of combining Open Source applications and building an all encompasing sandbox to house all the sub systems in such a way that the whole is one seamless system to the user. Their web based interface is simply put, elegant. Although, with dhtml they could see significant improvements in performance, the underlying applications are sweet.
This is the type of project model that proves the effectiveness of Open Source. The Company has an awesome product that is built on components that anybody can download and interrogate the source.
The only thing that sucks with CN is, like other Enterprise SCM systems, its damned expensive. But any reasonable sized programming firm that builds on their platform have to work hard to screw things up.
BTW - who owns Collabnet?... Just the Tim O'Reilly, Founder and President, O'Reilly & Associates. And Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation. Honorary super hackers in my eyes.
I'm just waiting to see an open source project emulating what collabnet is doing. Anybody interested in building an open source CN offering. I'd be there in a flash!
JsD