30
Apr
I’m sitting at McCarran International Airport, waiting for my red-eye to Boston. Last night I stumbled into Doug Levin of Black Duck Software at Mandalay Bay’s Starbucks. The first thing Doug told me was that “Next Monday we are announcing acquisition of Koders.Com”.
Doug’s fledging company now has a search engine for open source software source code at its disposal with all strings attached to it such as activity data. Doug did not disclose details of the transaction, but said “It was a good opportunity to move our business forward. We may buy more…”. Levin added that “business is doing well, and money is floating around.” Congratulations with a good buy, Doug!
With acquisition of Koders, Black Duck can solidify its positions as a market leader for open source intelligence, I believe it missed an opportunity with SourceKibitzer. The latter, led by Mark Hofman, received a small Series-A venture capital funding from Ambient Sound Investments (ASI) and Serenda Estonia backed by Skype and Rate.ee co-founders.
SourceKibitzer has developed an advanced analytics solution, named EyeQ that provides transparency to anyone who is dealing with software development and allows automated day-to-day overview of development team performance. The service is targeted primarily at companies with software development teams that consist of at least 10-20 developers. By the end of 2008, the projected capacity of SourceKibitzer’s infrastructure will support simultaneous monitoring of 10,000 developers.
SourceKibitzer business model is similar to that of Black Duck’s. According to Mark Kofman, SourceKibitzer is currently offering three subscription plans, EyeQ LITE, EyeQ FULL and special pricing for those who are willing share feedback.
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18
Jul
Apatar team is getting ready to head out for two trade shows - OSCON and LinuxWorld.
Although the two conferences may sound similar to you, they are very different. As ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn puts it:
- OSCON is a theater. LinuxWorld is a show floor.
- OSCON is intimate conversation. LinuxWorld is hard negotiation.
- OSCON is beer. LinuxWorld is wine.
- OSCON is polo shirts. LinuxWorld is business suits.
- OSCON is a code wizard. LinuxWorld is a star salesmen.”
I would like to invite you as a Naked Open Source blog reader to attend (passes will be provided by Apatar):
1. O’Reilly Open Source Convention, taking place in Portland, OR on July 23-27, 2007.
O’Reilly’s OSCON is perhaps best conference for open source developers. Speakers include Chris DiBona from Google, Larry Wall creator of Perl, Guido Von Rossum creator of Python, Rasmus Lerdorf creator of PHP, Robert “roml” Lefkowitz, Matt Asay from Alfresco, Brian Aker from MySQL, Mitchell Baker from Mozilla, and many others.Parallel to OSCON, there will be an OSCAMP, an “open” space for meeting, for learning, for connecting, for writing code … The agenda is created and modified “on the fly” by the participants. You can add to the agenda any issue that importance to you. Most of the key points and next steps will be captured in Wiki online so that the entire Freedom/Libre/Open community can benefit from our work. To register for OSCAMP, follow the instructions on the Registration page.
2. LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, taking place in San Francisco, CA on August 6-9, 2007.
LinuxWorld is a more business-oriented event, and a good place for to catch up with latest developments in the world of infrastructure, Linux and Open Source software. Speakers include Brian Aker of MySQL, Matt Asay of Alfresco, John Roberts of SugarCRM, Raven Zachary of The 451 Group, Andrew Morton of The Linux Foundation, Werner Vogels, VP and CTO of Amazon Web Services, Kevin Kettler, Chief Technology Officer of Dell, Diane Greene, President and CEO of VMware, Ron Hovsepian, President and CEO of Novell and many others. 
Attendees will be able to participate in the developer’s contest for the most innovative Apatar DataMap (and win a 80GB Video iPod), find out more about Apatar Data Integration, view live presentations and learn about the upcoming features.
If you are interested in attending any of these conferences, email me your name, and I will register you for the shows.
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25
Feb
Before: Century of Technology
At the end of the last century, those who had accumulated the most brilliant technological inventions became the leaders of the world of enterprise software today.
Oracle, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, and hundreds of other successful companies have created the industry based on proprietary Intellectual Property (IP) and patents.
What has the open source movement done for the industry? Apache, Linux (in the server market), and Sendmail have commoditized their product categories. Eclipse has changed Borland’s IDE business. jBoss and MySQL are more often in a replacement business instead of going only after non-users who can’t afford commercial solutions.
Can you imagine what open source will do during the next decade to the enterprise software industry?
Now: Century of Marketers
In the past, engineers and companies with the best patented technologies were the ones who received funding and developed the best products. 
Today, we see an array of open source companies creating products and “application stacks” using IP developed by the community.
In the last century, Intellectual Property creation and engineering were core business activities to software vendors; today, IP creation and marketing is core, but IP engineering is not. From a VC perspective, startups are not fundable unless they are ready to outsource IP engineering.
The software companies who best communicate the value of their solution to the audience, be it the end user, the community, or the enterprise customer, are sure to be the winners as the industry moves into the next economic cycle.
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Posted by Renat Khasanshyn 
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