Collab.net Inc has received initial funding from Benchmark Capital, the VC firm behind Ariba, eBay, Genesys, Red Hat and Scient, among others. Collab.net is the brainchild of Brian Behlendorf, a co-founder of the Apache Software Project, and publishing company O’Reilly and Associates. The company was established to provide scalable service and infrastructure for the development of open source software. Its first project was sourceXchange, a marketplace designed to unite open source developers with companies prepared to fund open source software projects (CI No 3,662).
Since its inception, the SourceXchange site has signed up 2000 developers and seven Requests for Proposals (RFPs). Collab.net promises more such services for later this year. We’re believers in the business opportunities created by open source, said Benchmark partner Kevin Harvey. Like Red Hat, Collab.net’s business model adds real value to the open source development projects. As for Behlendorf, he says the Benchmark money will be used to hire a team to flesh out the Collab.net offerings. Building this community and this service will not be easy work, he admitted. While Benchmarks’s investment doesn’t take away the challenge, it does enable us to face it head-on.
