100 Million And Counting...

100 Million Dollars.

This is the amount of open source funding I have come across in my 22 weeks of compiling The Open Source Update since March 2005. This is by no means a complete survey of open source funding during the period, and this does not include any funding in the Linux hardware or hosted services space (areas we don't cover in depth).

Known Open Source Investments, March-August 2005

NOTE: All amounts are listed in US Dollars. If multiple funding rounds are listed, only the most recent one took place in the review period.

ActiveGrid
LAMP Stack
$10M Series B (Worldview Technology, Hummer Winblad, Allegis)
$3M Series A (Hummer Winblad, Allegis)

Alfresco
Content Management
$2M Seed (Accel)

Black Duck
Software Compliance Management
$12B Series B (Fidelity, Intel, SAP)
$5M Series A (Flagship, General Catalyst, Red Hat)

EnterpriseDB
Enterprise Database
$??? Series A pending
$??? Seed (Gary Long, ???)

Funambol
Mobile Synchronization
$5M Series A (Walden International, H.I.G.)

Greenplum
Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing
$??? (Dawntreader, EDF, Hudson, Mission)

GroundWork
IT Management
$8.5M Series B (Mayfield)
$4M Series A (Canaan)

JasperSoft
Reporting Solutions
$8M Series C (Partech International, Doll, Moregnthaler)

Laszlo
Rich Internet Application Platform
$6.25M Series B (Mitsui, Sofinnova)
$12M Series A (General Catalyst)

Logicalware
Email Management
$550k Seed (Sigma Innovation, Bill Dobbie)

OpenLogic
Developer Stack Certification
$4M Series A (Appian, Red Rock, Highway 12, Village)

Pentaho
Business Intelligence
$5M Series A pending
$500K Seed (???)

Simula Labs
Open Source "Incubator"
$10-$15m (Redpoint, Mission)

SpikeSource
Stack Certification
$12M Series A (Fidelity, KPCB, Intel, Omidyar Network)

Ubuntu
Linux Distribution
$10m

Univa
Grid Infrastructure
$8M Series A (ARCH, New World, Appian, OCA)

If we add to this the amounts presented in Michael Goulde's recent talk, "Open Source Software: At the Crossroads" at the Forrester GigaWorld IT Forum in May 2005, the total amount of recent (say, the past 18 months or so) open source funding is even higher.

MySQL: $19.5M, JBoss: $10M, SugarCRM: $7.75M, Jabber: $7.2M, Optaros: $7M, GlueCode: $5M (purchased by IBM for considerably more than this), and SourceLabs: $3.5M.

And let's not forget Palamida: $5M.

165 Million Dollars.

The rate of open source investment is increasing. It's all too easy to compare the current situation with the last major speculative technology investment period, whether appropriate or not. This is starting to feel like 1997 or 1998.

How is it different this time? Is this good news for the open source community? Will the new wave of funding bring tension between purely open source plays and "proprietary open source" vendors? Is all of this speculative or are the business plans sound? Are all these VCs hoping for a GlueCode? Is everyone focused on services and support revenue?

Post your feedback and please send us any corrections to the funding list above. We'd love to know what you think! This is a community, after all.

Microsoft Virtual PC for Windows...oh, and OS/2!

I recently purchased a new Intel PC to experiment with various open source operating systems, such as Linux (miscellaneous distributions), FreeBSD, and OpenSolaris. I had initially planned to use Symantec PartitionMagic to allow for multiple operating systems to be installed on the same drive using partitioning.

While my experience with PartitionMagic was positive, the process of installing multiple operating systems on the same computer was not so good. It seemed that every operating system wanted to be THE operating system - writing its boot manager over the top of the other installations. Yes, it is possible to make this work, but not without a lot of effort.

I've had plenty of experience installing operating systems, but almost always one operating system per computer. Lacking the time to learn the intricacies of boot management and lacking the funds to purchase seven computers for this task, I purchased Microsoft Virtual PC for Windows.

As a Mac user, I've had experience using Virtual PC for many years. This software allows multiple operating systems to be installed and run on a single computer using virtual machine technology. Each operating system is saved on the drive as a file and can be "booted", as needed. This would be my testing solution.

The software arrived today, and I was surprised to see (or rather, not see) that Linux was not listed anywhere on the box, in the manual, or even on the primary Virtual PC web site (without considerable searching). Yet, Microsoft was kind enough to point out that yes, Virtual PC can be used to run IBM's now discontinued OS/2 operating system. Thanks. And, a search from the Virtual PC support link on Microsoft.com for the term "linux", yielded the top results of "How to Remove Linux and Install Windows XP", "How to Remove Linux and Install Windows on Your Computer", and "How to Remove the Linux LILO Boot Manager".

I don't doubt that the majority of Virtual PC sales relate to testing and debugging of software on the various Windows releases (Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 98, etc.). That said, I couldn't be the only person who has purchased Virtual PC to make the process of installing Linux more user friendly.

So why not mention Linux, especially when mentioning OS/2? Why does Microsoft, a public company valued at almost $300 billion US, care if Linux is mentioned at all? Does Microsoft not want to include "Linux is a copyright of Linus Torvalds" on the box? It wasn't because of this, as I found no copyright reference to OS/2 (I could only locate a Windows copyright statement on the box). As Microsoft seemed to ignore IBM's copyright, ignoring Linus would be a given.

This experience brings back memories of BEA and JBoss. In 2003 and 2004, I could never get anyone from BEA to acknowledge that JBoss was harming or had the potential to harm WebLogic sales. I was able to find a reference to JBoss within a BEA 8-K SEC filing, regarding potential business risks. This was the only acknowledgement of JBoss I could find within BEA at the time.

Microsoft doesn't need to play the role of ostrich and Linux is already acknowledged by Microsoft, as indicated in a recent SEC filing ("We face strong competition from Linux-based, Unix, and other server operating systems").

Microsoft should care about the potential impact of Linux, but not the extent of leaving it off software product marketing materials when this information may be relevant to their own customers.

Selective reality.

Feedback from OSCON, Exhibit Day 1

What a day!

I just returned to my hotel after a long day at the OSCON exhibit hall. Bob Thomas and I spent most of the day at the EOSJ booth, shaking hands, handing out the inaugural issue of EOSJ, and talking to advertisers and writers regarding upcoming issues. We're on track to run out of magazines by the end of tomorrow. This is especially impressive considering that all attendees received a copy of EOSJ in their OSCON backpacks. It seems that a lot of people are picking up extra copies to take back to their colleagues and managers. This reinforces our belief that EOSJ has the opportunity to play an important role in the advocacy of open source in the enterprise. Not only that, but EOSJ includes content that is of interest to the general open source community. Over 50% of the OSCON attendees are developers.

The morning began with a fortuitous event. Andrew Morton, the lead Linux Kernel maintainer, held up a copy of EOSJ during his OSCON keynote and read excerpts from two of the articles. This was unexpected and highly encouraging. I won't put this in the same category as a product endorsement, but it was more than we could have ever hoped for at our first exhibiting conference.

In the afternoon, I had the opportunity to speak with Kim Polese, the CEO of SpikeSource, and personally deliver the magazine to her. Kim had heard of the magazine from Ray Lane, the Chairman of SpikeSource and a general partner with the VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Encouraging feedback from the lead Linux developer and one of the founders of Java on the same day! Can you get any better than that?!

Today was a day of confirmation for EOSJ. It's one thing to believe in your work, it's entirely something else to get positive feedback from the full spectrum of the open source community, from individual users to visionaries.

Yes, this is preaching to the choir, but at least the choir is all singing the same tune. The open source community is standing behind EOSJ, and with this, our mission to reach out to the enterprise and advocate open source has been strengthened.

Live from OSCON 2005 in Portland, Oregon

Bob Thomas (the publisher of EOSJ) and I arrived in Portland, Oregon, today for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON 2005). We will be at the convention center on Tuesday for meetings and booth setup. On Wednesday and Thursday, we will be at the EOSJ booth in the exhibit hall. We were able to register today and get a preview of things to come this week. Every attendee backpack includes the inaugural issue of EOSJ and we will be handing out additional copies at the EOSJ booth on Wednesday and Thursday.

This is an exciting week for EOSJ! We attended OSBC in April, but the inaugural issue had not yet been printed. This is our first tradeshow with magazines in hand. We are looking forward to meeting face to face with members of the open source community at OSCON 2005 and getting feedback.

The Open Source Update newsletter on Thursday will include announcements from OSCON 2005. Stay tuned...