OStatic

We've recently written about potentially far-reaching moves by the U.S. government to switch significant parts of its internal software infrastructure to open source. First, the news came out that Whitehouse.gov is now based on the open source Drupal content management system (which OStatic runs on too), then the U.S. Department of Defense announced its plans to move to open source software components and platforms.

When the news broke about Whitehouse.gov and Drupal (and the Obama administration has indicated intent to run other government sites with Drupal), my first thought was that Acquia, which provides commercial support for Drupal, might see some valuable support contracts from the government. InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues takes the idea one step further, though, and I'm inclined to agree with him.

As GigaOm notes, San Francisco-based startup Engine Yard has raised $19 million in a third round of venture capital funding from DAG Ventures, Bay Partners, and Presidio Ventures (a Sumitomo Corporation company). The investment follows a total investment of $18.5 million in the company in 2008 from Benchmark Capital and other investors, one of which was Amazon.

Engine Yard offers a cloud-based hosting environment for Ruby on Rails applications.? Ruby on Rails is an open source software framework that underlies Twitter and many other well-known applications. You can find many notable applications based on it at Open Source Rails. With substantial funding under its belt, Engine Yard's next move may be to expand its support and services business, a la Red Hat.

Recently I got to talking open source with a friend of mine who has worked in the proprietary database market, especially at Sybase, for several years. He made a few interesting observations during the conversation. For example, we talked about open source competition in databases, and he said a few good things about MySQL, but also said that the proprietary databases often outdo MySQL based on just a few small features, and also commitment to legacy systems that many companies have. His take on what Oracle might do with MySQL is that it might treat it as an open source on-ramp to its own proprietary databases, but that Oracle will have to keep MySQL like WordPad --Microsoft's text editing application, which falls far short of the features found in Microsoft Word.

When we got down to discussing business models for successful commercial open source companies, my friend especially liked the Red Hat model of providing support and services for free software, which has provided the company with substantial financial success, and also consistency. There are quite a few companies following the Red Hat model, and there are also signs appearing that that model will end up immeasurably improving important open source software applications and platforms--not just business bottom lines.