“…on January 25, 1999 — Brian Behlendorf began working
for his publisher, Tim O’Reilly. His mission: to develop new open
source business models. “I couldn’t afford to just work on
Apache for the rest of my life,” recalls Behlendorf, “I wanted to
do something like this commercially…I realized that it’s beyond a
Web server, beyond Linux. It’s about the development process; it’s
about the mores and protocols and ethics…in this kind of
community.”
“Although he didn’t know it at the time, Behlendorf was
developing a new business model based on open source, while
simultaneously developing a set of tools that have the potential to
change the software industry. In the 18 months since his move
to O’Reilly, a number of companies, including Behlendorf’s
start-up, Collab.Net, have begun building businesses based on
providing services and marketplaces that will enable a new kind of
animal: the professional open source developer.”
“While Behlendorf was developing the business model that would
eventually become Collab.Net, Hewlett Packard’s Open Source
Solutions Manager Wayne Caccamo approached him looking for a way to
better work with the open source development community. Behlendorf
took HP up on the idea and the result was SourceXchange,
Collab.net’s first attempt at creating an online marketplace for
open source projects.”
“At its core, SourceXchange is about connecting individual
developers with one-off projects — it is the place where you might
get a specialized Apache module developed to help your company’s
e-commerce site. It’s not where you would develop the next Linux
OS. In February of this year, Collab.Net unveiled its next project,
the Tigris hosting platform, and the first company to use it,
Hewlett-Packard, which hired Collab.Net to create a community
around its E-Speak voice recognition software. With Tigris,
Collab.Net has glued together a number of common open source
development tools using Java servlets, but the real value of
Tigris, according to Behlendorf, is the hosting and consulting
services that Collab.Net brings to the table.”