Matt Asay, Principal at Amazon Web Services and contributor to InfoWorld, has written an article outlining a bit of history of how open source has been attracting attention - and VC investment - since the early 2000's.
Investment in open source software was slow to start, but it's afire now
Investment in open source technologies and companies has been going strong for more than two decades. If anything, it keeps accelerating, along with the innovation.
Open source used to succeed by copycatting proprietary software. Now it’s winning by creating whole new categories.
- Matt Asay
Innovation acceleration: new and better alternatives to proprietary software
Many of early open source investments were companies like Alfresco, which aimed to offer an open source alternative in an established software category. This made marketing easy: Someone else had already spent the money to create the category, and all you had to do was commoditize it through open source. We had open source app servers (JBoss), open source customer relationship management (SugarCRM), open source business process management (Bonitasoft), and more.
But then a funny thing happened on the way to the market. Open source got innovative.
That has been true at our company - innovation on our open source process automation platform has been ongoing for over 10 years. We're no longer a start-up seeking investment (we passed that milestone eons ago in internet-years) but as one of the key differentiators of Bonita is its extensibility, we're following the exploding open source business tech scene with interest, ready to integrate the new and in some cases, ground-breaking platforms, applications, and systems that continually appear in the landscape. Was it just a few years ago that RPI popped up? (OK, maybe it was eons aso in internet-time...)
There never has been a slowing in open source investment since Red Hat lit the fuse in 1999. If anything, it keeps accelerating. And because open source companies must spend heavily to create new markets rather than copying old markets, we can expect the funding to get even bigger, faster. There’s a lot of money in free software, it seems.
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