There is a funny thing about commercial open source software companies as much as they like talking about their community-driven open source heritage they end up doing a lot of things their proprietary counterparts do. Spout off about being enterprise-ready, boast, offer TCO studies, and all manner of other things that make them look like a typical proprietary software company. A lot of them neglect the transparent open source traits that makes them truly disruptive and interesting (see yesterday’s post on SourceFire).

Open source software is a disruptive technology it’s about changing the status quo. Open source is rock and roll while proprietary software is easy listening. That’s why I always admired JBoss’ Marc Fleury. Marc was and is a bad boy, a rebel, and he played the part to a successful $350 million dollar acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat. Beyond that he was a professional who built a company that was professional and respected grew his customer base and created an iconic software brand. All things that are consistent with open source software, he also seemed to have a good time doing it.

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Technorati Tags: Appcelerator, JBoss, Legacy, Loopfuse, Marc Fleury, Red Hat, Ringside Networks

This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job.

What is apparent Red Hat’s no longer exciting. They’ve crossed over to respectable elder statesman of open source. The action is among the new batch of up-and-coming open source software companies who are not yet venture backed but are developing interesting technologies and services. Here are some of the companies that may well be the new open source superstars.

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Technorati Tags: Appcelerator, applications, Bitnami, Bitrock, Business, Conference, Enomaly, Loopfuse, MindTouch, Open Source, Red Hat, Ringside Networks, startups

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