It took them several years, and after the dot.bomb we might have been thinking they'd never be back at it, but it seems like VC money is finally finding its way into Open Source. Not in Open Source per se, but in the pompous and rather foolishly sounding Professional Open Source (POS), which in the end seems to be the exact same thing, only you get to pay for it. The funnier thing about all this is that - suddenly - Open Source news becomes newsworthy on business channels.
JBoss, a company which won't remembered for its fine communication ethics, and certainly not for value-add in its message, received lots of love from journalists and analysts. CDN, a loosely-tied assembly of some free-lancing consultants suddenly seemed like a serious company, while as I'd love to see the share structure that holds these guys together (ditto with JBoss of course).
A bit more subtle, Gluecode has been hiring Geronimo folks, and will presumably be heading into the same POS direction but for another J2EE container. They did the same already with JetSpeed. And now TSS deems it newsworthy that some ex-BEA folks found some rich people to help them start SourceLabs, which isn't very clear about what products it is going to support at all.
Now, as some commenter on the TSS crying wall rightfully pointed out: "So, as with many things, it's all about expectations of the clients." I suspect we're talking here about clients who want to pay before feeling sure, since code which costs must obviously be more valuable than code for free.
Now, I'm all for professionalizing Open Source, and it is obviously something we are trying to do from our own little business perspective, but I feel a bit awkward about these suddenly appearing entities, VC- and PR-backed, stating they will be providing Industrial Strength Support for Professional Open Source. My point is that the ability to provide support doesn't come from having read access to the code base and throwing monetary resources at reading and understanding the code, while drafting a professional install, user and reference guide.
Being able to support Open Source comes from being part of the group that discussed and drafted a certain design, comes from reading CVS commit messages on a daily basis while adding your own commits to that, comes from a deep understanding of the dynamics which led to a certain decision, and comes with intimate knowledge of the living history of the project. While I'm enthusiastic about people stepping up and saying they are willing to retroactively learn all that, I worry about the learning time that lays ahead of them.
I can't quite say I equally worry about the VC funding such companies, but rather about the people who have put their money in the funding pool managed by them. Once again, this will be a "must invest" area, and the VC companies will stumble over each other in trying to understand what startup is the viable bet.
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