Open-source VoIP company wins funding

Digium, an open-source VoIP software maker, has received $13.2 million in first-round venture capital funding from Matrix Partners for the development of Asterisk. Asterisk is an open-source telecom platform with 1 million users. According to Huntsville, Ala.-based Digium, Asterisk's flexibility as an open source PBX lets companies build business phone systems that use both legacy and voice over Internet Protocol equipment.

Matrix was also an initial investor in JBoss, the open-source company recently acquired by open-source giant Red Hat. David Skok, a general partner at Matrix and a JBoss board member, said in a statement that companies attracted to the savings and capabilities of VoIP will open up new opportunities for Digium. "Digium is definitely in a position to become the next big open-source company, behind Red Hat, JBoss and MySQL," Skok said.

too bad. Asterisk was cool.

Now digium has to show 2M/year of revenue to make the VCs happy. They are either desperate for money (the consulting thing isn't working out for them), or the VC is very dumb. Dumb VCs lead to dead companies. Desperate companies don't work either.

So, this is not good news. It's sad.
Open source companies post-dot-bust 1.0 have to self-financing.