Bruce Perens Becomes CEO of VC

Bruce Perens writes "In August, I accepted the president's position at Linux Capital Group, a business incubator and venture capital firm specializing in Linux. This is explained in my open letter to the free software community on the group's web site. My firm has announced its first investment, in Progeny Linux, a company headed by Debian Founder Ian Murdock, which will produce a commercial version of Debian in cooperation with the Debian developers. We will be starting and funding several other Linux companies. We now intend to show other businesses by example how to succeed while being a good citizen of the free software community."

Comments

Re:Standards on Commercial Viability?

[Bruce Perens]

Is every company LCG invests in expected to be profitable within a reasonable amount of time

Every company, but not every project. In general an Open Source company might have software development as a cost center and support as a profit center. That means one costs money and the other makes money, and both are essential to your business.

Do you feel LCG has the experience and contacts to help find CEO's and management, connect startups with clients outside of the Linux domain, and give advise on all the nuts and bolts of starting a new company and making it profitable?

A lot of this is what Randall and Bern bring to the table. The both have a lot of experience in negociations between businesses, running businesses, etc. And of course we're looking for more people to help with this.

Thanks

Bruce

Would RMS have started GNU if he'd known?

[Bruce Perens]

Sometime yesterday, I was thinking Would RMS have started the GNU project if he'd known it would come to this? I'll see him on Tuesday and discuss it. But I'm pretty sure he would have. RMS envisioned a world of free software. He never eschewed making a living from it, in fact he consulted for Intel, making money by writing free software (enhancements to GCC) long ago. Thus, I think things are going pretty much as RMS wanted them to go in the large, but not in the small. I'm sure he would have preferred that everyone use the GPL (I would too), but he's accepted that the Open Source Definition is a definition of Free Software.

I tried to get RMS on my board, but of course he doesn't want his name used for marketing. I still expect to be talking with him regularly about my company's operations, and I plan to help out FSF in whatever way possible, with money if I can, software and other services otherwise.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:down the rabbit hole

[the eric conspiracy]

Is it just me, or has linux started absorbing (at an absolutely incredible rate) all the qualities it's supporters initially dismissed as both irrelevant and/or evil?

Such as? Shrink Wrap Licenses? Nope. Hidden NSA keys? Nope. Undocumented APIs? Nope. Unavailable source code? Nope. DOJ Anti-trust lawsuits? Nope. Undocumented proprietary standards? Nope. Upgrade treadmills? Nope. Slow response to bug reports? Nope.

Linux is supposed to be "free speech, not free beer"...

Think about what you just wrote. "Free speech, not free beer" directly implies making money from something that is freely distributed.

Any group of people will have a collection of views on the topic that are varied. However I think that most of the leaders of the open source movement have always wanted to put forth business models that allowed both the freedom of having open software and the ability to make money from that software. Even some of the most adamant, like Richard Stallman have put forth ideas on how to do this, and have put it into action. The Free Software Foundation does after all have expenses. Programmers have to eat and pay rent (although Richard Stallman did try to live in his office).

The thing most people worry about is somebody trying to limit free speech in order to increase their cash flow. Open source or free software should not be against making money per se. Involvement in commercial activity is in fact needed to improve the quality of the software. Companies like RedHat, SGI, IBM, SuSe and so on are contributing tremendously to the advances in Linux.

The important issue is to make sure free speech continues.

Welcome To Fundage

[Effugas]

We now intend to show other businesses by example how to succeed while being a good citizen of the free software community.

Ooh. Nice little swipe at Corel, there.

(Bruce, unfortunately, has expended much effort converting them into an open source outfit...really, I think we need to start communicating with both *Marketing* and *Legal* at *EVERY* company that's doing something in Open Source. The former failed at Sun, and the latter failed at Corel.)

That being said, I think there's some interesting impacts to be seen. Debian may have its annoyances, but lets not forget: Its packaging system is just so far and away superior to Redhat's at the moment, that it borders on ridiculous. Corel should be praised highly for showing that the traditionally least user-friendly Linux(ok, past Slack) has some amazing potential hidden inside.

OK, so now that Linux has some money, here's the question: What do we wanna see come out of the fundage? Here's *my* candidates:

1) Get some money flowing to a few critical projects. VNC, the any-to-any screen transfer system, needs a crew of crack developers! The ORL(now AT&T) guys have done an amazing job, but they don't have time to take VNC to where it really can be. Mindterm, by contrast, has probably the most unsung hero in the entire Open Source world toiling away, putting out revision after revision of a *world class* SSH client written in 100% Pure, Finally-Got-Its-Killer-App Java. This project is going exactly where it should be, and we ought to do what we can to keep it that way.

2) Contests. A major currency of Open Source is recognition. Lets divide the year into seasons and create cash prizes for best Open Source releases. Two types--one, for individuals, with the obvious stuff(best newcomer, most useful, etc.). Another, for schools. Lets reward classes. Lets reward departments. Linux is much cheaper for the cash strapped to deploy, particularly if you consider that our development environments are free too. Some very exciting stuff has been done teaching kids Python; this is a model that deserves further research!

More later. I'm interested in reactions.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Re:down the rabbit hole

[Bruce Perens]

Open Source never meant taking a vow of poverty. Having people be able to support themselves while making free software is an opportunity we should take advantage of to the utmost, because that way we will have more free software.

The challenge is to embrace our success without losing the qualities that got us here. If I'm not meeting that challenge, I want to hear from you just how, with details, when that happens.

Thanks

Bruce

The "Officers"

[gregbaker]

The list of corporate officers is interesting. Bruce (CEO), Ian Murdock (the "ian" in Debian) (CTO), and two guys with financial backgrounds as "Chairman and Business Development director" and CFO. Nobody has said much about Ian being there.

Also interesting, Wichert Akkerman (current Debian leader) is on the Advisory board.

At the moment, it looks like it's a Debian VC firm. I'm sure that will change, though. (Even if it doesn't, I'm all for more money in the Debian world.)

Greg

Why criticize this?

[_blueboy]

It seems many people think this is a bad thing, that somehow we shouldn't be making money off free software. I see this as very similar to the independent music scene, where some people dislike a band simply because they "sold out". But if a band has greater freedom to produce the music they want to, then in the end everyone benefits. The situation is the same with free software.

Think about it. Why should we care if companies are making money off free software? If the codebase is still open then it should make no difference to us. In fact, I would argue that this is not only not a negative move, but a positive move that will benefit the free software community.
Three reasons: first, when money is on the line, companies are _forced_ to make a good product, or it won't sell (No M$ bashing, you must admit that their products are all good in one way or another). If the product doesn't sell, they will fix it.
Second, when you are writing software for profit it gets done (usually). This means that instead of release dates like "version 0.2 will be out as soon as I get some time off from my hectic schedule" will become "version 2.0 -- out February 2000"
Third, with more and more profit based companies contributing open source code (or vice versa, open sourcers making a profit), the big companies are becoming convinced that open source is a viable option. As this increases, we will see more and more proprietary code opened, which, no matter how you look at it, is a good thing.

Feel free to suggest other reasons why this is a good thing. To Bruce, congratulations, and best of luck.