OStatic

Chumby Industries announced this week it has secured $12.5 million in Series B funding that will allow the company to accelerate growth of the company, and expand and broaden the Chumby Network to other screen-based Internet connected devices. (Chumbies are Wi-Fi connected gadgets that receive news and entertainment streams based on an open platform and a modified Linux kernel.) This is great news for Chumby fans who will hopefully soon see some new features and improvements to their gadgets.Along with the post above, it also shows that venture capitalists, who have been talking about supporting the open source community for a while now, are willing to put their money where their mouth is.

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.