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The Mozilla Foundation's Mitchell Baker reported yesterday that Mozilla's revenues were up approximately 12% in 2007 over 2006. She also mentions a few matters that are worrisome. Though eWeek's Joe Wilcox's predictions of Firefox's demise are premature and without a doubt require a sizeable grain of salt, he makes a good point concerning revenues coming from Google versus Google's commitment to the Chrome browser.
With the economy as volatile as it has been, there has been a good deal of speculation (both positive and downright pessimistic) about how open source companies will negotiate the ups and downs to come.
Today, Open-Xchange must be feeling quite optimistic, as it announced it's just closed a round of venture funding totaling $9 million and has four times the number of paid mailboxes now than it did last year. The company is focusing on a decidedly rosy looking future.
The 451 Group is out with a new report on venture capital funding for open source, and the news is rosy. The first quarter of this year brought more venture capital funding for open source than ever before, totaling $203.75 million, up from $100.4 million in the same quarter for 2007. The beneficiaries included well-known players such as Automattic and SugarCRM. There was more than a double for year-over-year fudning growth, although the news immediately follows a plunge in VC funding for open source that arrived in the fourth quarter of last year. The report also includes some good analysis of how VC funds are flowing to the open source community.
According to a talk by Benchmark Capital's Rob Bearden at this week's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), the nature of open source business models are changing. He says open source companies should strive to become the enterprise standard in their market space in order to effectively monetize their commodities. He also notes that if companies are willing to embrace the idea of making money off their open source projects, then they might be rewarded with an infusion of venture capital cash.
