At Lightspeed we’ve been investing aggressively in open source software (OSS) businesses for the past 10 years. Recently, we’ve seen a significant increase in entrepreneurs pitching open source startups, and we’ve also seen greater competition for these deals. We pulled together some numbers in an attempt to measure the acceleration in interest in and funding for OSS businesses in the last few years. The results were staggering even to us.
While tech giants in the West squabble over who owns what propitiatory tech one of their Chinese competitors has decided to do the opposite. The Chinese technology firm Baidu has announced the “Apollo” project. With the aim of making all of their self driving tech open source and available to the automotive industry at large.
Hardware has always lagged behind software in the open source movement. But one website is beginning to change that.
Emile Petrone founded Tindie for selfish reasons. “The basic idea was that there wasn’t a marketplace for the things I was interested in,” he says. At the time, those things were his latest DIY hardware obsessions—specifically, kits to support Arduino and Raspberry Pi. “Ebay’s not really right, and neither is Amazon. Hardware projects had no natural home.”
