The Open Source Startups are Coming...The Open Source Startups are Coming
"Open-source applications are very real, and the ones attracting the attention and venture capital have a core of committed developers operating in the open-source community. The question is whether they'll mature into enterprise-class applications...The open-source model is giving birth to for-profit companies like SugarCRM, Greenplum, and Pentaho. These companies are building a new generation of business applications for managing Web content, customer relations, and enterprise resources that are cheaper and may be more dynamic than their commercial counterparts. And their approach just might succeed in changing the way software gets made and sold...The question pivots on whether business customers are willing to put their trust in a bundle of software that's partly controlled by businesses with managers and revenue expectations--and partly not controlled at all. A growing number of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are betting that they will."
Read more in this InformationWeek article.
