Byron Sebastian
SourceLabs
www.sourcelabs.com
When Byron Sebastian quit BEA Systems in 2004, he took a few months off to learn the guitar, bum around San Francisco, and lie on the beach. That was the idea, anyway. In reality, Sebastian spent a lot of time contemplating the princely sum companies spend on software licenses -- $16 billion a year, by some estimates -- and how that figure keeps growing apace, even though, in many ways, the software isn't getting much better.
When he got back home to Seattle, he did some digging to figure out why companies don't use more open-source software instead. The consistent response? "They see it as a risky choice," he says. "They're adopting Linux, and are starting to take it to the next level with middleware and databases." But when it comes to replacing applications from suppliers such as Microsoft with open-source programs, many outfits remain wary, he says.
To help overcome their reluctance, Sebastian started SourceLabs. The company serves as a middleman -- the proverbial one throat to choke -- for big companies that may want to dabble in several open-source projects, but don't want to deal with multiple vendors. The way he sees it, he's solving a big problem, both for companies and the open-source community.
Open-source developers don't have access to huge clusters of machines that can test and validate how their software runs and interacts with other pieces of open-source software. SourceLabs does. In turn, it offers those so-called stacks free of charge, making money by providing maintenance and support. SourceLabs has signed up Merrill Lynch as an early customer, with other deals in the works, Sebastian says.
SourceLabs has raised $3.5 million to date and has investor firepower in Ignition Partners' Brad Silverberg, a former Microsoft insider, and Danny Rimer, who also funded MySQL and Trolltech, among other open-source ventures. Sebastian recently hired Bruce Perens, a leader in the open-source development community, as vice-president of developer relations to help get much-needed buy-in from the community.
Despite those advantages, growth may be slow. Trusting a business to an unknown startup isn't much more reassuring than trusting it to an open-source coder. And SourceLabs has some stiff competition from SpikeSource -- the well-backed Silicon Valley startup going after the same opportunity. If the market is as big as these players say, they could both do well. But they'll need to win over a lot of risk-averse users first.