Larry Augustin, a venture capitalist and early open-source entrepreneur, made a really good point via e-mail in reference to my post about VMware violating the GPL. A range of people in the open-source community has been pointing the finger at VMware for allegedly creating derivative works of Linux in its …

Source:The Open Road

Share This

Share This

The Guardian probes an interesting dilemma for startups: Should you flip or float (an IPO)?

The truth is that innovation blackmail [Starting an industry-changing company] and selling out is becoming an increasingly attractive option. With the world’s financial outlook so torrid that even the most strapping City magnates are being shrivelled up by paranoia and turned into little human prunes, we can’t anticipate much different.

Nobody gets into the startup business just to be average. You’ve got to have big ambitions: change the world, make a fortune, get famous - or perhaps all three. The scrutiny that young dotcoms are under means very few entrepreneurs are simply hoodlums who think they’ll blackmail their way to a retirement fund. But there are two real exit strategies for a startup founder: to flip or float. Option two is disappearing fast….

The post comes in response to Tom Foremski’s post about disruptive startups selling out to the very companies they should be putting out of business. Foremski’s is a fair critique, but as The Guardian notes, it might be that startups have little choice but to succumb. Entrepreneurs like cash, too.

As for open-source startups, Tim O’Reilly posited a year ago that open-source disruptors would mostly end up feeding the hands that they had been biting: “I will predict that virtually every open-source company (including Red Hat) will eventually be acquired by a huge proprietary software company.”

… Source:The Open Road

Share This

Share This

Microsoft has gone on the Wii attack, arguing that 60 percent of Wii Fit units sold go unplayed or, rather, that they are played once and then never played again.

Microsoft…went on to call the Wii Fit a “gimmick”, and said that Microsoft was working on creating interfaces that

… Source:The Open Road

Share This

Share This

Microsoft has gone on the Wii attack, arguing that 60 percent of Wii Fit units sold go unplayed or, rather, that they’re played once and then never played again.

Microsoft…went on to call the Wii Fit a “gimmick”, and said that Microsoft was working on creating interfaces that

… Source:The Open Road

Share This

Share This