The Good Ol' Days
Some years ago, technology journalist Amy Harmon traveled from Manhattan to MIT to attend the first Free Software Award ceremony at the Media Lab. While in Cambridge, she took the opportunity to interview
Bob Young.
The resulting N.Y. Times article, with a headline For Sale: Free Operating System helped stimulate Wall Street's interest in the then pre-IPO Red Hat.
Higher up the Stack
Recently,
publicists working with venture capitalists (VC) and
their portfolio companies are issuing press releases
announcing funding for companies
based on the Open Source business model which has picked up steam again along Sand Hill Road.
This week, Gary Rivlin writes that the good ole
days may be returning for a new generation of
start-up companies with products
and services that reside further up the software "stack."
On the track
SpikeSource received its start-up financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
GroundWork Open Source Solutions landed cash from Canaan Partners
and Mayfield Fund.
MySQL AB, based in Sweden, is backed by Index Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Benchmark Capital, which once held a 5 percent stake in Red Hat.
MySQL has a VC-friendly business strategy utilizing the dual licensing business model, releasing software under the GPL and a closed license.
In Atlanta, JBoss is financed by Matrix Partners, Accel Partners and Intel Capital.
VC, who once walked the aisles of a .org pavilion in search of engineering talent, now
have a growing organizational infrastructure and open source network to use.
Last year, Seattle's Voyager Capital, joined the Open Source Development Labs in an
effort to keep its finger on the pulse of the new shared
technology and business plans.
» PermaLink
|
Miguel de Icaza today received the Software Tools User Group (STUG) award from USENIX, sharing the honor with Mattias Ettrich of KDE. The award was announced by Mike Jones, the USENIX president.
Ellie Young and her friendly staff at USENIX have organized an impressive conference
that has brought 600 participants to southern California. Anaheim, home of Disneyland, has an area
around Convention Way which is meticulously clean and features neatly trimmed bushes in
the shape of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. USENIX regulars such as Peter Salus
and Jon “Maddog” Hall could be seen holding court in the lobby of the conference hotel. Outside the hum of power lawnmowers fill the air.
In making the award to GNOME and KDE, USENIX said:
Recipients of the annual STUG award conspicuously exhibit a contribution to
the reusable code-base available to all and/or the provision a significant,
enabling technology directly to users in a widely-available form.
The UNIX Command-Line User Interface (CLI), while widely recognized as being
efficient was often attacked by non-UNIX users as not being user friendly.
While many GUIs have been added to UNIX over the years in trying to make it
easier to use, these were often considered inferior to many non-UNIX GUIs.
In October of 1996 and August of 1997 two projects were started to produce
desktops that were easy to use, mapped to traditional UNIX philosophies and
gave access to all of the underlying features that the CLI contained.
While these desktops competed with each other, they also lent strength to each
other and have now produced a range of applications that we collectively
call KDE and GNOME. These applications have allowed different implementations
of the Unix operating system into the non-technical marketplace. Most
importantly, by embracing the concepts of Free and Open Source Software, these
two desktop projects allowed for freely distributed code that allowed any
distribution or software developer to utilize these graphical features.
The USENIX Association would like to recognize both of these groups in creating
a set of libraries, tools and applications which are portable and run across
several different operating system platforms and hardware architectures.
Thanks to USENIX for providing this recognition to Miguel, Matthias and all the free desktop developers around the world.
» PermaLink
|
|
web news:
|
