Wednesday, September 29, 2004

CRN | Breaking News | Former BEA Execs, VC Heavyweights Launch Open-Source Startup

CRN | Breaking News | Former BEA Execs, VC Heavyweights Launch Open-Source Startup "Besides its management team, all of whom left BEA earlier this year amid the software vendor's organizational turmoil, SourceLabs has some impressive VC backers. Brad Silverberg of Ignition Partners and Danny Rimer of Index Ventures have joined SourceLabs' board of directors, and together their VC firms contributed $3.5 million in funding to the startup.
...
Sebastian, who left BEA in January, called SourceLabs' strategy a way to provide "dependable, open-source systems" to customers that want one throat to choke for support and maintenance of open-source software stacks. He said he got the idea for SourceLabs by asking about 60 industry experts why open-source software, aside from Linux, wasn't being used broadly in enterprises. His discovery: Customers face a choice of buying proprietary software and being locked into a particular vendor for support and maintenance, or cobbling together open-source systems from a variety of software and calling several companies or searching list-serves for support when there's a problem.
SourceLabs wants to give customers a third option, one that Sebastian thinks will make open-source more prevalent in the enterprise. "We want to provide open-source systems that have been preintegrated, tested and certified so that if something goes wrong, they have one number to call," he said."

Is anyone on the SourceLabs roster not a former Microsoft "Internet dove"?

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