The reason we are confident that the comparative decline in the use of the GNU GPL family of licenses and the increasing significance of complementary vendors in relation to funding for open source software-related vendors will continue is due to the analysis of our database of more than 400 open source software-related vendors, past and present.

We previously used the database to analyze the engagement of vendors with open source projects for our Control and Community report, plotting the strategies used by the vendors against the year in which they first began to engage with open source projects …

One of the favourite blog topics on CAOS Theory blog over the years has been our quarterly and annual updates on venture capital funding for open source-related businesses, based on our database of over 600 funding deals since January 1997 involving nearly 250 companies, and over $4.8bn.

There are still a few days left for funding deals to be announced in 2011 but it is already clear that 2011 will be a record year. $672.8m has been invested in open source-related vendors in 2011, according to our preliminary figures, an increase of over 48% on 2010, and the highest total amount invested in any year, beating the previous best of $623.6m, raised in 2006.

Following the largest single quarter for funding for open source-related vendors ever in Q3, Q4 was the second largest single quarter for funding for open source-related vendors …

451 Research has today published a report looking at the funding being invested in Apache Hadoop- and NoSQL database-related vendors. The full report is available to clients, but non-clients can find a snapshot of the report, along with a graphic representation of the recent up-tick in funding, over at our Too Much Information blog.

Open Database Alliance formed. Oracle buys Virtual Iron. AccesStream reaches version 1.0. And more.

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I’ve just met a fork named Maria
MySQL founder Monty Widenius and Percona CEO Peter Zaitsev announced the launch of the Open Database Alliance - “a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL.”

Continuent and Open Query quickly announced their membership, while Monty later …

Javier Soltero, former CEO of Hyperic, has maintained that the sale of Hyperic to SpringSource was driven by discussion between himself and SpringSource CEO, Rod Johnson, but the fact that the companies shared investors - Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital - no doubt accelerated the deal (and I wonder whether either could have afforded to acquire the other without shared investors).

When examining the open source vendor landscape it is tempting to imagine that the combined total could be bigger than the sum of its parts - that a combination of many open source product specialists could mount a challenge to Red Hat and Sun to claim the title of biggest open source software vendor.

Benchmark and Accel are among …

Topics for this podcast:

* Open source getting, and going without VC investment
* Oracle contributions to Linux and open source
* Sun’s latest moves with MySQL database and version 5.1
* Linux in high-end computing

iTunes or direct download (25:50, 6.0 MB)

My CAOS colleague Matt Aslett wrote recently about how we expect to see an uptick in open source merger and acquisition activity given the current economic conditions and bargains for the larger, mostly proprietary players. Matt also discusses the difficulty of further VC funding, though we have seen some significant investment announcements, such as Open-Xchange, Infobright and others. Still, Matt is probably right that funding will be harder to come by for any company, open source or not.

I also continue to see a number of startup and younger open source vendors — would-be fundees — that are opting to hold off on venture funding and stick to building up business, customers and …

VentureBeat and OStatic are among the news source reporting the launch of Cloudera a new vendor set up to provide support for Apache Hadoop and related projects.

Given the current economic outlook it’s great to see a new open source start-up rearing its head, and the list of founders indicates that this one has a good chance of survival. While VentureBeat is focused on the fact that Ex-Google, Yahoo, and Facebook employees are on the team, my eye was caught by the fact that Mike Oslon, Sleepycat Software founder and former CEO has been tempted out of semi-retirement.

Until this week Infobright’s claim to open source fame was its partnership with MySQL that enabled its analytical data warehousing software to act as a storage engine for the open source database.

However, the company is now taking the open source route itself by releasing the code behind its Infobright data warehouse (formerly Brighthouse) as Infobright Community Edition.

Earlier this month the company announced that it was moving to a subscription model for the commercial version of the product, Infobright Enterprise Edition, which comes with “enhanced features, services and support, warranty” amongst other things.

The company has also announced a $10m Series C investment …

A classic Morecambe and Wise comedy sketch from the 1970s sees Andre Previn criticizing Eric for playing all the wrong notes while attempting the Greig Piano Concerto. Morecambe responds that he is in fact “playing all the right notes. But not necessarily in the right order.”

I was reminded of the sketch this morning while reading BusinessWeek’s article on the potential perils facing open source vendors today. It seems to ask all the right questions, but not necessarily in the right way.

The report suggests that while industry giants such as IBM, HP, Oracle and Intel stand to benefit from open source software, investor impatience could spell trouble for open source …