OStatic

The Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) is coming up, to be held March 24th and 25th at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The conference will include much discussion on the future of open source. In preparation, OStatic has been? running a series of guest posts on this theme, featuring thought leaders from top open source projects. We checked in with Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal content management system, and co-founder of Acquia. Martin Schneider, director of product marketing for SugarCRM, weighed in on the open cloud, and Novell VP Justin Steinman wrote about open source and mass customization. Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft, also discussed the consumerization of information. In this latest installment in the series, we have a guest post on the future of open source from Erik Troan, founder and CTO of rPath, which offers a platform for software vendors to create and maintain software appliances and virtual appliances in multiple virtual machine formats.

There is more good news for open source on the venture capital front. Following record inflows for venture capital into open source for the first quarter, The 451 Group is reporting that VC funding levels rose again in the second quarter as compared to last year. Funding rose just under 14 percent to $115 million, compared to $101.5 million in 2007. Here's the really striking stat: Total funding for the first half of the year to date stands at $321.3 million, up 62 percent over the first half of 2007, just shy of the $328.5 million raised in the whole of last year.