"In the limestone hills surrounding Lake Travis just
outside of Austin, yet another small startup is struggling to catch
on and make it big. Rocksteady consists of CEO Kelly Loony, Mark
Gaither, VP Web Technology, CTO Dr. Peter Mullarkey, and Richard
MacKinnon, VP of marketing. Two things sparked my interest in
Rocksteady: its business model and a simple twist of fate. The
model is the same one adopted earlier this year by VA, and more
recently by Ximian, Inc. It is the hybrid model: a mix of open
source and proprietary software. Is it the path to financial
stability sought by entrepreneurs in the open source/free software
communities? Time will tell, but based on recent history, they
won't do any worse than the pure open source plays that came -- and
went -- before them.
Allow me a moment to explain the twist of fate. In the late
1980's, I was part of a migrant digital tribe whose online home was
a small, West Coast site called Portal. Portal was a poor
stepsister to the much-ballyhooed site called The Well. By taking
advantage of PC Pursuit's deal that allowed unlimited non-prime
connect time and Portal's low monthly fee, we could feed our online
addiction at a bargain basement price. But all too soon Sprint
bought PC Pursuit and that was the end of the unlimited connect
time plan. The tribe split up, but many of us migrated to Bix after
Bix made us a similar offer. One of the people who worked at Portal
in those days was Richard MacKinnon. That's right, the same one who
is now VP of marketing at Rocksteady. When he contacted me last
month, asking if I were the same Joe Barr who used to be on Portal,
I knew there was going to be a story somewhere. Here it is.
My initial visit to Rocksteady occurred several weeks ago. I met
with Loony, MacKinnon, and Dr. Mullarkey. They briefed me on the
history of Rocksteady and what they hope will become its premier
offering. Unlike many other struggling startups in search of
angels, Rocksteady already has customers. Big name customers, at
that. Schlumberger, the oil services giant, and Vignette, the Web
publishing people. Vignette has Rocksteady products in production
environments today. Schlumberger is evaluating a custom network
security product."
