Open Source News

Thursday, January 5, 2012

GrabCAD sketches out a $4M bump in funding
Open source CAD software startup GrabCAD Inc. has taken in $4.2 million in new funding, boosting its initial tranche of $1.1 million in June according to an SEC filing this morning and the GrabCAD website.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Basho brings in $5M in 2nd round of 2011
Big data storage firm Basho Technologies Inc. said Tuesday it has raised a $5 million inside round, its second fundraise announced this year.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Dimdim sells to Salesforce.com for $31M
Dimdim Inc. of Lowell has been acquired by San Francisco-based Salesforce.com in a cash deal worth $31 million. Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce said it was interested in Dimdim’s completely cloud-based real-time communication technology.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

How I See It: Open source needs firm foundations
No matter who you are, you and your business depend on open source software. The wisdom of purchasing decisions involving open source software necessarily relies on the assumption that the teams that developed the software will continue to maintain it. So as we reach the start of 2011, you might want to ask: will those developers really be there in a year?

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

The Pitch: IT startup eZuce targets open source communication
Newburyport startup eZuce Inc. develops software-only IT applications intended to run on standard off-the-shelf hardware and operating systems. Its Communication as a Service product is intended to unite all forms of digital communication for companies.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Blog: MIT kids use Kinect to surf the web, start a gold rush
Rodney Brown blogs: Now that Microsoft Corp. has done a 180 and now supports people hacking its new Kinect full-body motion control system, real-world applications beyond dance games are coming fast and furious. The latest is from the MIT Media Lab and is eerily reminiscent of the movie “Minority Report.”

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Black Duck keeps acquiring with SpikeSource buyout
Black Duck Software Inc. continues its growth spurt, following its October buyout of Ohloh.net, with its latest acquisition of SpikeSource, a software developer in the field of security vulnerability and application component identification.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Acquia adds $8.5M to open-source firm's fundraising
Acquia Inc., a Drupal-based social publishing firm, has raised an $8.5 million Series C round of funding from return Boston backers North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners, along with Acquia CEO Tom Erickson.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Black Duck CEO Yeaton joins China open-source think tank
Black Duck Software CEO and president Tim Yeaton has joined the China Open Source Software Promotion Union (COPU) Think Tank, an alliance of businesses and organizations aimed at promoting open source software in China, as a senior advisor.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Tech across New England: Basho leading with open-source database approach
Mass High Tech looked at startups poised to lead the economic recovery because of their technology, management team or growth potential. Basho Technologies is competing for a slice of the emerging NoSQL approach to database management, and its Riak key/value store is gaining customer adherents.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Open-source content management firm Nuxeo lands $3.3M
Nuxeo, a Burlington maker of open source enterprise content management software and services, has raised $3.3 million in venture capital, led by OTC Asset Management.

Monday, June 21, 2010

AcrossWorld eyes global access to free college courses
AcrossWorld Education Co. Inc. launched last year to bring freely available college-level courses to developing communities across the globe. To do so, it is hoping to emulate the success of another company that has been a big winner in monetizing free content — Red Hat Inc.

Friday, May 7, 2010

Ex-Sun exec Padir turns focus to startup's open-source software
Karen Tegan Padir recently changed denominations when she left Sun Microsystems Inc. Now Padir is proselytizing about another of the many SQL database schisms, PostgreSQL, at the Westford startup EnterpriseDB Corp. And Padir said that her new gospel is better beloved of the Java congregation than her previous MySQL mission.

Friday, April 16, 2010

VCs seek crowdsourcing opportunities in business
Area venture capitalists are betting that crowdsourcing — the idea behind Wikipedia and open-source software — can penetrate some of the most staid industries: patent research and business-to-business credit checks.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Red Hat innovation flows from Westford
It may seem to be a contradiction that one can make money from a free product, but the folks at Red Hat Inc. have been doing that successfully for more than a decade, in no small part by continually driving innovation in their version of the free Linux operating system and the software that supports it.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Startup Scene: State of open source software at 25
Gesmer Updegrove LLP's Andrew Updegrove: The advent of free and open-source software has reoriented the way in which many of the largest IT companies in the world compete. Companies like IBM, Intel, Nokia, Motorola, Oracle, and of course Google, use FOSS as both an enabler and a weapon.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Rapid7 buys open-source platform Metasploit
IT security testing and management technology developer Rapid7 announced Wednesday it has acquired Metasploit, which is developing an open-source attack testing platform and is expected to boost the capabilities of Rapid7’s network vulnerability monitoring software.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Thought Leader: Open source based in co-dependence
Karen Copenhaver, a partner at Choate Hall & Stewart LLP, and one of Mass High Tech’s 2008 All-Stars, is an expert on technology licensing, particularly in software licensing and open source. Recently she spoke with Rodney Brown about open source as a business model, where it came from and where it is headed.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Drupal creator's startup, other firm, seek lead roles in open source
If two companies launched here have their way, Massachusetts will become a double epicenter for open-source software. Two startups with Massachusetts roots are hoping to become the next Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) of their respective open-source communities, and venture dollars are chasing their efforts.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Black Duck: Full open source software may cost $387B
Black Duck Software Inc., a Waltham-based company with the largest database of open source software, has estimated the total cost of full open source software development at $387 billion.