Open source software (OSS) is entering the mainstream – but to the chagrin of most VCs and early OSS companies, it has not played out as expected. OSS is now widely adopted among the developer community, and if a company that develops software (either for internal consumption or as a business) has not incorporated OSS into the lifecycle of their development processes, they are behind. OSS has emerged as a core enabler of cloud computing. Without it, much of the benefits of cloud computing would not be possible. Successful software companies that are the commercial version of an open source project (Acquia/Drupal, Revolution Analytics/R, et al) have figured out that there is little advantage uniquely promoting their “open source identity. Rather, the successful ones (e.g., RedHat) push more traditional marketing messages of being better, faster, cheaper, more innovative than their competition.
