Comments on: Open-source venture funding down 12 percent...or is it?

Open-source funding appears to be down, but this may be because the data is bad.

[mattaslett]

Hi Matt,

I think "faulty" is a bit strong, but then I am biased. I only ever include deals that have been publicly announced to avoid any potential problems related to non-disclosure and confusion over dates. The value Cloudera deal hasn't been publicly announced yet.

If there are any deals that we have missed that were announced in Q3 I would be more than happy to update the figures. What deals were you thinking of?

Otherwise, if you are right about the number of deals not yet announced I guess we'll see a significant uptick in Q4.

Matt

[Matt Asay]

I didn't intend any offense, Matt. "Faulty" was perhaps the wrong word. "Incomplete" would have been better.

The problem with taking only publicly announced deal sizes is that that leaves off the table a wide array of data. The only way around this is to dig, which is a pain, but I do think it results in a better data set.

[mattaslett]

That is a fair point, but another is that I have to be confident in my data. I can be confident that we have covered 100% of the publicly announced deals. If I start adding undisclosed deals to the list then naturally I can never be sure to have got everything. That, combined with the risks of breaking an NDA means I'm not going to go there. So yes the data set is limited, but within those limits it is complete.

Besides, I didn't see people complaining about incomplete data when it was showing growth for open source ;-)