"Phurnace.com's founders, Daniel Nelson and Robert Reeves, used an open source infrastructure to develop, maintain, and market an application that makes Java deployment easier and more streamlined. For these entrepreneurs, open source was a means to creating the best possible product with the least amount of startup capital.
"Nelson and Reeves were in the MBA program at the University of Austin and won a business plan competition, along with some startup capital, for their open source business idea. 'We saw a need in the marketplace," Nelson says. "It was the apocryphal conversation around a beer: 'There's gotta be a better way...''"
