OStatic

By Allan Leinwand, a venture partner with Panorama Capital and founder of Vyatta. He was also the CTO of Digital Island.

I was having lunch with Kelly Herrell, the CEO of Vyatta (one of our portfolio companies) and he gave me a great quote on why the momentum of open source software is impossible to fight. Kelly said, ?Competitors can try to lock the front door of an enterprise and effectively stop traditional software vendors from entering the building, but it is impossible to stop free bits from coming in over the network.?

By Alistair Croll

Guest Post By Kord Campbell

I'm a software evangelist for an IT search engine startup in San Francisco, doing a guest post here on OStatic. We just released a new version of our software which provides REST-based APIs for developers to extend and enhance the basic functionality of their products, beyond what we originally designed. Much like Sleepycat did with Berkeley DB, or Flickr does with their APIs, we encourage an open system for accessing the data that the proprietary product stores.

Written by Allan Leinwand, a venture partner with Panorama Capital and founder of Vyatta. He was also the CTO of Digital Island.

The use of open-source software and commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware is making a profound impression on the telecom market -- one that seems destined to follow the path blazed by web economics. To date, the telecom industry has not yet fully embraced open-source and COTS hardware, something that I believe is a fait accompli -- regardless of any course of action taken by traditional vendors.

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOm.com

A few months ago, Anne Zelenka wrote about how WordPress could be an underpinning of a social network, an idea first postulated by Chris Messina. Of course, when Automattic, the startup behind WordPress.comοΎ’s hosted service, raised a whopping $29.5 million in VC funding recently, I speculated that they might be adding social networking features to their service. Now it is almost certain. (Continue reading at Gigaom.com.)