August 11th, 2009
Open source living on VC time
The acquisition of SpringSource by VMWare, combined with Friendfeed’s acquisition by Facebook, clears the decks for Benchmark Capital to make new investments.
Kudos to the venture capital (VC) firm’s general partner Peter Fenton, who shepherded both success stories through the venture capital process.
The price on the deal, $362 million plus the assumption of debt, is curiously close to what another Java framework outfit, JBOSS, fetched over three years ago.
This may also make VMWare a more powerful adversary against Red Hat, although I had thought they were competing with Citrix’ Xensource. Silly me.
Whatever. All this proves, as if Alfresco executive Matt Asay needed reminding, that when you’re funded by a VC your life, and future, are at the mercy of the VC’s ambitions, and your sale will happen at its convenience. Your job is to execute.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There is, in fact, nothing wrong with that at all.
I should also add that the corporate, VC-backed vision of open source is not the only one out there. It competes with both the corporate-backed non-profits like the Mozilla Foundation, Apache, Eclipse and Open Office, plus true community offerings, which may or may not have a commercial arm.
What all these folks want from you is attention. Attention as a user, attention as a beta tester, attention perhaps as a programmer, even perhaps an employee. Maybe you’ll make some money. Maybe you’ll make some big money. People do.
Just remember that all these models — the VC model, the corporate model, the community model — operate by the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.
And remember one more thing. Your time, your talent, your attention, these are not straw. They are gold threads. Treat them as such.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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