If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

Hunter S. Thompson

Drupal recently made a deal with the devils (venture capitalists) by virtue of the a $7 million investment in Acquia. Acquia owns the Drupal brand (or at least legally they do). Drupal lead (and Acquia co-founder) Dries Buytaert and the fine people at Acquia along with their backers are now at the crossroads faced by every vendor who sells free software… How do they supply a return on their investment without recommitting the sins of their proprietary software brethren or alienating the community that so far has driven their success.  

Despite being the owner of the Drupal brand and employing the project lead Dries Buytaert, Acquia has to figure out how to balance their commercial concerns as well as the care and feeding of the vibrant Drupal community.  Luckily on the announcement of their funding Dries is saying all the right things:

However, a good number of Acquia people will be working 100% on Drupal, alongside the rest of the community. This is an important investment,because Acquia succeeds only if Drupal succeeds, and we’re going to do our part. We’ll contribute code, QA testing and other important things like user experience design, marketing, documentation, etc.

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Technorati Tags: Acquia, Alfresco, Drupal, Hunter S. Thompson, Joomla!, marketing, Open Source, SugarCRM

This week was a big week for open source software with funding announcements for a number of companies including Alfresco open source document management), which closed $9 million in series C. GreenPlum (open source BI data warehousing) pulled in $27 million. My own company Zenoss nailed $11 million in series B too. Somewhat lost in the shuffle was Intel’s investment in REvolution Computing creator of parallel computing software for computational statistics.

REvolution Computing provides software and support for high-performance statistical and business intelligence tools, including R. They provide commercialization and core parallel computing technologies (automatic parallelism in most cases) that renders R practical for production and regulated use. According to REvolution the ability to effectively deal with very large data sets and provide high-value research was reliant on expensive tools. 

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Technorati Tags: Alfresco, BI, Compiere, CRM, Greenplum, Nat Friedman, Open Source, OpenBravo, Pentaho, REvolution Computing, Statistics, Venture Capital, Zenoss

Greg sent me this article at the New York Times,"Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again" and Stacy says (via Matt ) Balmer is hunting for Open Source Start-Ups.

"We will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products," Ballmer said during an onstage interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

A refusal to consider acquisitions of open-source developers "would take us out of the acquisition market quite dramatically," Ballmer said–a tacit acknowledgment of how thoroughly open-source development has reshaped the software market.

This gets me to thinking…

With the Yahoo! acquistion of Zimbra for $350 million and theCitrix acquisition of Xensource for $500 million is there an impendingfeeding frenzy for open source companies? It wasn’t that long ago thatRed Hat bought JBoss and Oracle acquired Sleepycat. Maybe these are just the beginnings of a bigger trend.

So back to the boys from Redmond, so who does Microsoft buy and why?

Well I would think youneed to discount the database market, they wouldn’t want to competewith MS SQL.They probably would stay away from CRM because of Microsoft Dynamics.

Perhaps they should buy a company for the technology and somethingcomplimentary to their portfolio. Granted a company with a largecommunity might be nice but could be quickly alienated because ofanti-Microsoft sentiment that prevails in many open source communities.What might be even better is an open source software company that theycan take from obscurity and fueled by the Microsoft channel and theirhordes of cash. These are the areas that come to mind.

Systems Management – They could grab a monitoring company since they don’t really have a heterogeneous management solution. I won’t even dive into this for reasons of my Zenoss connection. [Of course there's an idea. ]. They could go big and acquire publicly held SourceFire for their security offerings. With the recent addition of ClamAV to their portfolio maybe Microsoft could pre-install open source virus software on Windows servers. I bet Symantec and McAfee would love that.

• Advertising and Web Marketing – Well they just gobbled up Atlas Solutions maybe they should look at buying someone in open source who’s early stage and can run on Micrsoft server, Loopfuse (Marketing and Sales Automation) or web ad server maker OpenAds .
• Other ideas — Here’s some other creative ideas:
• They could stick it to Google on the search front and acquire Appscio (formerly Avidence) for their video search technology unless they are
  • shedding their open source ambitions with their old name. Alfrescofor document management makes sense, and it runs on Windows. I alsodoubt there is too much anti-windows sentiment in their user base. Maybe take CleverSafe’s p2p storage technology and incorporate their technology with Sharepoint somehow.

funding open source start-ups centered around promising open source projects. Maybe They could seed them in Microsoft’s Codeplex and bring them them up under the rainbow colored Microsoft Windows umbrella.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Technorati Tags: Alfresco, Appscio, ClamAV, Cleversafe, Loopfuse, Open Source, OpenAds, SourceFire, Zenoss, Zimbra