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The Great Open Source Debate

Posted Mar 24, 2008 02:05pm EDT by Sarah Lacy in Investing, Internet, Venture Capital, M and A, IPOs
Related: rht, sunw, ctxs, msft, orcl, yhoo
Can you build a billion-dollar business by selling software on the cheap, or even giving it away for free? That's the central question haunting the Valley as open source startups struggle to go from big installed bases of customers to big businesses. Dave Rosenberg is a longtime open source gadfly, blogger, and conference organizer. These days he's chief executive officer of his own open source company, Mule Source. It's one of several hundred open source companies that venture capitalists funded in recent years in a bid to build the next Red Hat. Well, Red Hat's stock isn't looking so great these days, and most of the promising open source companies have been bought. Does anyone have the chops to become the next Oracle or SAP?
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9 Comments

madmilker57
madmilker57 - Monday March 24, 2008 02:16PM EDT

dang! funny the guy name the company...Mule Source! everyone knows...when it comes to work...a mule turns his a!! to it.

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Dave R
Dave R - Monday March 24, 2008 02:36PM EDT

The true story is that our software is called Mule and used for system integration which our co-founder calls "donkey-work." Also, since a Mule carries a payload it does make sense (we're not just crazy open source guys :)

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madmilker57
madmilker57 - Monday March 24, 2008 03:34PM EDT

well, Dave....my mule rides, drives and packs and if you open source guys don't know what WHOA! means....your never put a pack on that donkeys back and use the words "haw" and "gee". :)

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Yahoo! Finance User
Yahoo! Finance User - Monday March 24, 2008 03:36PM EDT

Here are some well-known open-source projects to take a look at: Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com) Firefox (http://www.firefox.com) You can find tons more open-source projects at places like SourceForge (http://www.sourceforge.net).

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you
avance6 - Monday March 24, 2008 10:15PM EDT

Man, Rosenberg is good. He's even funnier on Open Season though. http://www.theregister.co.uk/software/open_season/ It's the greatest podcast of all time, according to all of the smart people I know, and they know a lot.

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you
avance6 - Monday March 24, 2008 10:16PM EDT

Wow, they'll post any comment here.

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you
djc06001 - Tuesday March 25, 2008 07:30AM EDT

I still think ORCL will buy RHAT. Larry wanted JBoss and lost it to RHAT. This way, he gets it back. Larry also tried to release his own Red Hat knockoff; why not own the real thing? Oracle is under intense pressure to offer their products on Red Hat as an alternative to Solaris in the SMB market.

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you
Jason L - Tuesday March 25, 2008 09:50AM EDT

The ticker for Sun is JAVA, not SUNW :)

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Erik B
Erik B - Tuesday March 25, 2008 12:39PM EDT

djc06001, ORCL already offers all of their products on RHAT, and after buying BEA, what would ORCL do with JBoss?

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