Slashdot Mirror
Venture Capital in Open Source
conq writes "BusinessWeek has an interesting article on the recent interest of Venture Capitalists in Open Source. Also, a look at some of the latest companies they are supporting. According to the article, the first of three main criteria VCs look at in choosing an open source company is 'community. There has to be a huge amount of interest in it. [MySQL, Zend, and TrollTech] were already incredibly popular [when we invested]. The community is your marketing and evangelism arm. They're going to contribute and make sure this piece of software truly becomes mainstream.'"
It's the late 90s all over again.
Entrepreneurs are every bit as eager. The words "open source" are finding their way into pitches and PowerPoint presentations around the world.
Does anybody else find the above statement from the article ironic?
Bradley Holt
There has to be a huge amount of interest in it. [MySQL, Zend, and TrollTech] /.
Perhaps you would be interrested in funding my new start-up: Tech Trolls; there is a huge community of us on
One thing threatening Open Source revenue today--piracy.
As we have already seen, the GPL is under attack from evil forces known as "pirates." These shadowy folk silently steal source code and violate the GPL, infringing on the rights of GPL authors. They are nothing more than thieves getting a free ride off the work of others, and I for one am disgusted at the idea of it. As you can see in the previous article, clearly Slashdot is also sickened by the idea of copyright infringement and piracy.
Some have even called for a lawsuit against these pirate thieves. Suing individual infringers has always been a position that Slashdot and its readership has supported, so it's only fair that the original GPL authors protect their rights and safeguard their material from being stolen in the future. I think we should all support any lawsuits against these infringers to protect the rights of GPL authors everywhere.
I appluad Slashdot and its readers for always taking a proactive stance against piracy and copyright infringement in general, and I would like to join the cause against this "source code theft." Piracy is a major threat facing OSS today.