Interesting juxtaposition. How can you be open and still secret? Well, secret for a while, anyway. I attended a VC gathering the other day here in Minnesota, which was a panel about new trends and developments in software. One of the panelists was Matt O’Keefe, who founded Sistina Software, bought by Red Hat about two years ago. Matt now has a new (stealth) startup, about which I know little more than the name: Alvarri … even after the panel! And his web site sure is interesting! (If it’s even his.) But I sure know open source runs all through this new gig of Matt’s, with his stellar background.
Anyway, later in the panel, Matt came out with a comment about open source that jumped out at me: at Red Hat, only 2-3% of users actually pay for support. Another panelist, the software analyst at Piper Jaffray, said that’s the greatest challenge facing open source vendors, and the guy from Accenture tossed in that he doesn’t see that exceeding 5% anytime soon.
The whole notion of open source and new software startups came back to me when I saw Steve Larsen’s latest post on stealth company Krugle’s blog about the SD Forum’s meeting this week out in the Valley. Wish I could be a fly on the wall at that one.
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