Michael Gracie

Venture capital firms have been pouring money into open source technologies, and now folks are saying it could be a bubble about to burst. Is this money sitting on the table, looking for someplace to go, or a sign of things to come? I think it is a little of both.

Venture capital “overhang” was hitting new highs at about the same time the open source fervor was gaining momentum. So its natural that investors would take a peek. One only has to look as far as SourceForge to see there is a lot going on.
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I am curious as to what impact IBM’s decision to donate Rational IP to the open source community will have on folks like Microsoft, the Open Source Technology Group, and whomever else.

Anyone care to lend an opinion?

There is no surprise here.

The University of California at Irvine recently introduced new spam protection measures for their email systems, according to this report. What they didn’t do is buy a bunch of expensive software, appliances, or the like.

They used open source software - you know, the stuff you can pick up any afternoon from VA Software’s Open Source Technology Group cadre of sites and services, including SourceForge.net.

Three sincere cheers for UC Irvine, for understanding how to do it right (and hopefully support the open source community in the process).

About a week ago I was pondering the issue of VC overhang, and how a few interesting companies have been able to do without venture capital and still find ways to partner and/or exit. I attibuted more of the present course to deal saavy entrpreneurs than anything else, and now I am beginning to rethink that notion a bit more.
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For a colleague of mine: Financial Industry Floats Open-Source Messaging Standard for Web Services, SOA. I was recently introduced to some folks who have been working on a competing product (albeit for some time). It doesn’t surprise me that JP Morgan would try one on their own, with the goal of opening it up. Message queuing is well ingrained in the securities industry.

I will be curious to see if someone picks up on the idea of integrating these systems with Michael Stonebraker’s StreamBase.