

Any Open Source startups? - runT1ME

I'm looking for any advice regarding a startup that primarily sells services for Open Source products.  A lot of HN startups seem to be geared towards consumer websites or SAAS for B2B.  Anyone have tales of an Open Source B2B solution that is making money?<p>I've heard of the success stories, MySql, Redhat, Jboss, are there others I should pay attention to?  Thanks in advance for any advice, links to blogs, book recommendations, etc.
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briandoll
I'm not sure that there is much of a difference in an "open source" startup
vs. any other type of startup venture. The same market forces apply.

In the case of MySQL and JBoss, they have a free (beer and speech) offering
that met a huge need in the developer community, which got them their
necessary ubiquity. Once they had market share, they could start charging for
services and other things (didn't JBoss charge at one point for
documentation?, I forget)

Redhat is interesting in that in my opinion, they just showed the power of
business development. Customers like their software to be "guaranteed to work
on X", and software vendors like to keep X to a small number to reduce testing
cycles. If you look around at large software vendors that "certify" their
product on Linux, it's almost always on Redhat enterprise linux. This is a
business relationship, not a technical one. Redhat builds a rigorous release
process and helps companies certify, sure, but anybody could do that. They had
the vision to build relationships where they could pay off.

I'd argue that Github is an open source startup. They use, advocate, host and
inspire the open source community across every language and platform. They
also happen to be very successful. Tom's recent post on "Optimize for
Happiness" is a fantastic read, and would be something I'd read over and over
again if I were to start up a company anytime soon: [http://tom.preston-
werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happin...](http://tom.preston-
werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happiness.html)

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clark-kent
Automattic (<http://automattic.com>) The company behind Wordpress software and
<http://wordpressfoundation.org> is a good example.

Canonical Ltd with Ubuntu is another one.

The business model for open source business solutions is to give away the
software and build a service business around it as the domain expert. A
company like Engineyard makes money by selling services around Rails which is
open source. Some of the key Rails/Ruby contributors work at Engineyard.

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JeffJenkins
I work in the same office as the makers of MongoDB, and they're an open source
startup. I have no idea whether or how much money they're making.

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runT1ME
Ooh. Get one of them over here to post! But good suggestion on a company to
look into.

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RealGeek
WordPress is the best Open Source startup I admire. Not only WordPress is the
most popular CMS and blogging platform, it also helped Automattic to launch
many more products: <http://automattic.com>

Automattic has a very effective business model and a good stream of revenue
from several sources. Millions of bloggers, developers, designers and
consultants make living through the WordPress ecosystem. Many large blogs and
theme developers even make millions with WordPress.

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hajrice
activeCOLLAB. Open source alternative to Basecamp. I'm certain that they're
doing well over a million dollars a year now.

In a presentation, the CEO of activeCOLLAB(Ilija Studen) mentioned that they
were pulling in 50k Euros a month, this was back in 2007 *

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* Video Lectures.net(unfortunately it's on Croatian): <http://videolectures.net/webstart08_studen_sks/>

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runT1ME
Nice. I haven't heard of them, too bad they don't get more press, sound like a
promising company! Unfortunately, I don't speak Croatian...

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RealGeek
I believe activecollab started as "code a basecamp clone in a weekend" project
on HN.

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knoxos
I want to mention at this point <http://www.opscode.com> and
<http://eucalyptus.com/> > they are both successful with open source (of
course they are not anymore early stage startups)

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runT1ME
Thank you. Both neat companies I'll keep an eye on.

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ashleyreddy
Its my understanding that open source startups don't scale well because
revenue is derived from services vs software sales. It would be hard to get
venture backing for these. I'm sure there are a few outliers...

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statik
<http://www.couchone.com/> is totally focused on CouchDB which is open source
<http://couchdb.apache.org>

