The Cloudcast #256 - Can Open Source Companies Make Money?

Brian talks with Adrian Cockcroft (@adrianco, Technology Fellow at @BatteryVentures) about the recent Battery Ventures Open Source Summit (#BVOSS), trends in open source business models and how VC are thinking about investing in companies that leverage open source software.

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Show Links:

• Podcasts of all discussions from the #BVOSS event will be published in podcast form soon - details TBD
• Battery Ventures Homepage
• Adrian’s blog on Battery Ventures “Powered”
• Battery Ventures Open Source Summit - #BVOSS on Twitter
• RedMonk discussion of Accel Partners Open Source conference
• Rob Hirshfeld’s thoughts from the event
• Are VC’s a Funding Bridge for OSS Projects?

Show Notes:

• Topic 1 - It’s been awhile since you were on last. What are you focus areas these days?

• Topic 2 - Related to OSS-centric companies, Aaron and I discuss the “will they make any money” question all the time. BV had an event focused on this recently. What was the event?

• Topic 3 - There seemed to be a theme that OSS projects need to be delivered as-a-service. I saw a tweet that said, “Uber theme at #bvoss today: we need an OSS license that prevents AWS to make money off of our OSS code.”

• Topic 4 - There were several large end-customers (e.g. - banks) in attendance, talking about their OSS projects. Are they making any significant contributions to these projects, or is this mostly an effort to help them hire developers?

• Topic 5 - So what were the major takeaways from the conference?

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