Open-source traffic is way up in 2008
Just when I think we've tapped out all possible open-source business opportunities, I hear of another open-source start-up. Or several.
This past week I've heard of a few new ones, or of others that have been around for a while but have yet to take venture money. Reductive Labs (puppet project), Cilk Arts, RiverMuse, and Watircraft are a few that I can mention publicly, but there are several more that are still in stealth. In two cases, a business hasn't been formed but some very interesting ideas are being kicked around.
Open-source venture investing may be down this past quarter, but the ideas around commercializing open source continue to bubble up.
It's not a great time to be launching a new venture, unless you've got an idea that is long on product, short on sales and marketing costs, and inexpensive to manage. You know, an open-source venture.
Not that money needs to be involved. Sourceforge currently holds over 180,000 open-source projects, up from 168,470 projects in February 2008, and Microsoft's CodePlex, Google Code, and other repositories hold tens of thousands more projects, each also gaining new open-source projects this year.
In fact, traffic to each of these open-source project sites is up considerably in the past year:
Open-source Project Site Visitors
(Credit: Compete.com)No, it's not a great economy, but yes, open source stands to benefit. The traffic is increasing to open-source sites. Will the money?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
