Spikesource - third time lucky?

nicholas on 2008-04-06T11:02:28

So, Spikesource

• In 2005 raised $12,000,000 and launched at OSCON 2005, with a business plan of providing a certified open source stack for large companies.
• In 2006 raised another $24,000,000 and switched business plan to medium sized companies.
• In 2008 raises another $10,000,000 and switches business plan again to certify vendors' software stacks, be they open source, closed, or some mix.

I keep wondering where all this money goes - if they are so busy testing things, how come we never hear from them?

And will they be raising another $10,000,000 next year?

They use perl at least

Phred on 2008-04-06T16:20:05

One of their developers filed an RT ticket for mod_perl a couple weeks ago, but it turned out that the bug wasn't actually in mod_perl, but in Win32::Process or a similar package.

About a year or so ago they invited me to a Spike Source breakfast where they were trying to court open source software consultants to bring contracts to them and share the revenue. It seemed like an interesting idea, but they scheduled the breakfast for 8 am in Silicon Valley. That indicated to me a pretty big disconnect between those putting on the event and the invited attendees, trying to get a few hundred developers to come to a meeting at 8 in the morning is a losing proposition :)

Re:They use perl at least

nicholas on 2008-04-06T17:25:46

they scheduled the breakfast for 8 am in Silicon Valley. That indicated to me a pretty big disconnect

Maybe their rational was that they wanted to allow people to attend without interfering unduly with their day jobs, by getting it over early and allowing people to head onwards. But if this was the constraint they were working to, having an evening event for a couple of hours would have worked just as well, whilst also happening to match "typical" programmers' constraints better. So yes, I agree, "could do better".

Re:They use perl at least

Phred on 2008-04-06T19:06:30

I love breakfast, I really wanted to attend it, but I was up programming until 3 am the night before so I ended up missing it...