Open Source is not a Market Category
Venture capitalists are going for open source software. Good point from Robin Vasan, managing director at the Mayfield Fund: "We don't see this as a space, we're not calling this a category."
Accounting software is a category. Vertical applications have one category per target industry: "restaurant management software" or "radio station software". Open source is a set of norms, on top of which you can build a variety of development methodologies and business models. It's more general than a pure development methodology such as "Extreme Programming" or a pure business model such as "Per-Seat Licensing", but it's not a market category in itself. So it would be a difficult thing to do a magazine or trade show about.
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Don Marti
<dmarti@zgp.org>
