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Today’s Guests:
Sebastian Rupley, Co-Crank, PCMagCast.com
Patrick Norton, Managing Editor, Revision3
Annaliza Savage, Multimedia Editor, Wired
The Topics:
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Flashback: Investing in 'Professional Open Source' - Exclusive 2004 Interview with David Skok, Matrix Partners
In February 2004 David Skok's new VC firm - Matrix Partners - orchestrated, with Accel, a $10 million investment in JBoss, Inc. This first round of funding in an open source company was a bold play, but then David Skok, famous in the Java arena as the founder of SilverStream Software - acquired by Novell in 2002 - is no stranger to bold moves.
Very useful article. To learn more about JBoss in the open source space, but also, for insights on VC's changing perspective in a tougher IT environment.
#3
Viiky commented on 9 Apr 2004
Excellent article, Came to know about "Skok", first time, very interesting, will look for such article on this site.
Why I liked this article is because, I also like to find and investigate the industry move, and "Skok" is inspiring to me.
-Vikky
#2
efp commented on 8 Apr 2004
"the over-complication of J2EE"
Has everything not been said then?
By the way, the general public's appetite for RFID is comparable to its taste and acceptance of genetically modified food or hormones in milk.
The only way to force it down the throat of the public, is to make it illegal to discuss it (like hormones in milk) and to mandate everybody to use it. Even Walmart can't do that. You need the government to use brute force and to "create the market".
#1
Daniel Howard commented on 7 Apr 2004
To seize upon a minor point, Skok states:
"''That complexity is necessary in certain respects (as distributed applications are complex in nature). Expert developers appreciate the need for this. However, not enough attention has been paid to simplifying development, and making Java more accessible to a less expert audience who I believe make up at least 60% of the corporate developer audience.''"
"The most promising answer to the over-complication of J2EE, Skok adds, is something JBoss introduced in their 4.0 release: aspect oriented programming."
AOP is definitely a revolution along the same lines that OOP was a revolution. Like OOP, it will only simplify development for expert programmers who learn it well, not for the less expert audience. Like OOP, poorly written AOP will be even more difficult and error-prone than poorly written J2EE.
Even today, I know many people who misunderstand OOP and, heck, OOP has been mainstream for 10 years. AOP involves a similar leap of understanding and it will take years for the majority of programmers to accept it. Even then, like OOP, most programmers will not dedicate themselves to become expert in it and, thus, only gain limited benefits.
It is highly doubtful that AOP will do anything to help that 60%, ever.
mark wrote: Echoing the other commenter, InfoSolve does not provide open source. They provide source code for things they build on top of OSS to people who pay them. There is a distribution of source to the payer, so it's really a source code license. I think the magazine should do a little more homework before...
Lewis Cunningham wrote: On a related note, I recently created a database survey to learn some database usage patterns between commercial databases and OSDBs.
I plan to release the data openly, as well as my initial analysis, upon completion of the survey. I would love it if you and your readers would participate. It's j...
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