Conference showcases open source startups

At the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) East last week in Newton, Mass., 16 open source companies exhibited before a panel of three venture capitalists and a CIO. The winners were dubbed “the most promising startups to watch,” but there was also a practical undercurrent to the proceedings: funding.

It’s hard for VCs to get a handle on the open source market, conference director Matt Asay said, especially since only one open source company, Linux vendor Red Hat, has gone public -- and that was way back in 1999.  Asay said he thinks VCs are becoming much better educated about the open source arena, however, and more savvy at differentiating between true open source startups and those that are just jumping on the bandwagon.

The winners at OSBC East were content-management software vendor Alfresco, systems-management company Centeris, and EnterpriseDB, which sells an Oracle-compatible open source database. The honor is no guarantee of funding, but the conference’s track record is promising. At OSBC West in April, the winners were BitTorrent, Groundwork Open Source Solutions, Realm Systems, and SugarCRM, all of which have attracted venture funding.

“We’re batting a thousand,” Asay said.