Had the pleasure of meeting two of the folks behind Virtuas, Matt Filios (CEO) and Matt Raible (Practice Leader), a new (though actually old) entrant into the open source field. You can read all about Raible’s decision to make the leap here, and I appreciated the chance to hear a bit more about what they’re up to in person. Business model-wise, the closest analogue would be something like Optaros – which I’ve written up before (here and here) – but it sounds as the businesses will be rather differentiated in their respective focuses on training and implementation.
Either way, it’s good to see both a burgeoning interest in the business of open source. As I’ve discussed many times before, I’m not a purist in the sense that I believe there’s ample room for both commercial and non-commercial interests within open source, and I think the spate of recent open source oriented firms (BlackDuck, Gluecode, Optaros, Palamida, Sourcelabs, SpikeSource, etc) is a good indication of the opportunities for those in and around open source. Virtuas is just getting going, but I know I’ll be looking forward to seeing what they can do (and not just b/c they’re three blocks away ;).
