Here's the one-hundred second issue of COSS Weekly, the global commercial open source (COSS) company category newsletter, brought to you every weekend by the team at OSS Capital, creators and stewards of COSS Community and Open Core Summit.
We deliver only the most fresh 😋 news from the previous week in COSS across: Funding, Content, Jobs, Liquidity and $COSS (Public Markets).
Last week saw $121M in funding for StabilityAI and Generally Intelligent, the announcement of the AT Protocol for distributed social graphs, and content and discussions on open-source AI.
Enjoy!
COSS Funding: $121M
- StabilityAI, building the Stable Diffusion AI ecosystem, announced their $101M in funding at $1B valuation led by Coatue and Lightspeed Ventures. Link
- Generally Intelligent, developing general-purpose agents with human-like intelligence, launches with a $20M Series A led by Tom Brown. Link
- Gaurav Gupta: "1/3 Congrats to @EMostaque and the rest of the @StabilityAI team on raising $101M in funding! We at @lightspeedvp are proud to co-lead this funding round with @Coatuemgmt and believe in the mission to democratize generative AI. Our thesis here: https://t.co/KRLFOwOpTD" Link
- JJ: "LARGE congrats to @EMostaque on his first major funding milestone for @StabilityAI at $1 Billion --- I'm not an investor, but could have been early on (was too brain dead to dig in properly). https://t.co/2Kha03sAUj" Link
📚 COSS Content
COSS Community 🌏: "@gauravgram https://t.co/GpaW4cjfyq" [Link](https://twitter.com/gauravgram/status/1582117072951132160)
JJ: "👀 👍🏼 https://t.co/qRlYsHs3kb" Link
Tom MacWright: "wow: matthew butterick is spearheading a potential lawsuit against github copilot https://t.co/8T83wd4nIB" Link
Pierre Burgy 🚀: "We're live 🎙 https://t.co/6w6Wa8game" Link
Infinite Loops 🎙: "Our bonus episode with @EMostaque is now live! We discuss: 🔓Open vs closed AI ✅AI and problem solving 🧑🎓How AI can transform education 🧼The importance of clean data 👁️Preventing the panopticon ♾ MUCH more! Here's a preview: https://t.co/gBqWq9Ozfb" Link
AT Protocol: "Hello world! https://t.co/aFwZ1Xu7Lv" Link
JJ: "Latest open source @bluesky protocol work sponsored by @jack. Looks forked / based off prior work by @pfrazee @expede @dholms_. I predict a reasonable likelihood that @twitter adopts and migrates to this open procotol entirely if/once @elonmusk takes over. https://t.co/2WO2fkf1VZ" Link
JJ: "Here are two highly complimentary (imho) underexplored COSS / open core startup monetization methods that can be implemented alongside traditional approaches (insurance/*aaS/licensing/services/support): 🧵🤔" Link
Robert Scoble: "Last night's @StableDiffusion event video. See @EMostaque and team explain why large language models will enable creativity. The good stuff happens toward the end. https://t.co/3JFT9lubBv" Link
GitHub: "Game jams drive much of the creation of open source games, but, surprisingly, many games themselves are not actually on open source. What does the future hold for open source game development? https://t.co/R5EPPZM7rp" Link
JJ: "There are < 1,000 COSS startups in existence. > 90% were founded after 2012, 10 years ago. > 70% were founded after 2017, 5 years ago. > 50% have raised some form of VC funding (!). > 15 IPOs have occurred over the last decade. COSS as a category is very, very early... 👀🔥" Link
JJ: "BIG congrats to @rustdesk for crossing 30,000 stars and more impressively 100+ unique contributors. 🎈 🥳 Checkout the fastest growing Remote Desktop project in the world 🌍 👇🏼 https://t.co/ifepFQfsNT" Link
JJ: "✨📰 Today I'm thrilled to announce @OSSCapital's partnership with the legendary Justin Hoffman, who previously served at @elastic where he led sales / GTM from zero product or revenue through to $1B+ in revenue and a $5B+ IPO. This has been years in the making. Excited! 🤝 https://t.co/v3YQiIAHfT" Link
Open Source Startup Podcast🎙: "E60 of the Open Source Startup Podcast is ✨UP✨ @amanda_robs & @tnachen talk with @planetscaledata CEO @isamlambert about building highly scalable databases💪 && a HUGE s/o to the 24K of you who listen in on the pod🎧 Many more interviews to come😉 https://t.co/2dcxWGmHS3" Link
Kanjun 🐙🏡: "Today, AI systems can create stunning art & beat humans at chess & Go. But they can't do things a 3-year-old can do. Why? We're launching @genintelligent & open sourcing our research environment, Avalon, so as a community we can answer these questions: https://t.co/dNs0TpQeh3" Link
swyx 🔜 SFO: "Sobering post-mortem of @OpenStack on HN today. OpenStack "tried to replace AWS and compete directly with them." Fate of every devtool - we SAY we are fatigued, we want one end-to-end bundle to rule them all But they usually lose to specialized tools that do one thing well. https://t.co/GufEAEXUAN" Link
Daniel Jeffries: "Wrote this short article to say where @StabilityAI stands on 1.5 release. TLDR is that if we don't go a little slower + deal with sound feedback from society, our own ML researchers + regulators then there is a chance open source AI simply won't exist. https://t.co/nJ10XIABgs" Link
Emad: "@tszzl Would also mean stability ai has more ARR than openai 👀" Link
JJ: "Love this very much. We have done something similar in many investment docs with @OSSCapital... but we are considering adopting this model of ingraining commitment to truly open source at the core --- in actual corporate charter! Thanks for pioneering this, @sytses ♥️🤝 https://t.co/M1URv3DEjA" Link
Sid Sijbrandij: "Open source is more than a license. It's a company charter. The @OpenCoreVenture public benefit company (OPBC) charter is designed to prevent the bait and switch in open core https://t.co/LD7kWor69U" Link
TechCrunch: "Podcast app Pocket Casts goes open source https://t.co/T690pHRAEE by @psawers" Link
Elad Gil: "Fireside chat w @EMostaque CEO of @StabilityAI in SF, Monday Oct 24 7pm *https://t.co/4lEIh87s5v journey *Stable Diffusion & Generative AI *Use cases & startup opptys *Open source & AI *AI safety *Global AI Sign up here to attend live or for livestream: https://t.co/gQYpzIwVlC https://t.co/b62FYOMcGd" Link
JJ: ""From a developer standpoint, the unlocked 🔓 alternative open source version is always going to be better ..." --- @balajis 🎯 https://t.co/8i3fWuzqlH" Link
JJ: "ALL foundational LLMs / SOTA NNs should be fully open source (MIT / equivalent --- ethical licenses are nonsensical) and delivered with "SafeSearch" (ala Google) equivalent protective mechanisms. Regulate misuse, not the technology itself." Link
JJ: ""Model-as-Code" is a useful way of thinking about how powerful @cue_lang is for dramatically reducing complexity and friction in creating and scaling next-generation distributed services ... 👌🏼 https://t.co/bd2N7ktu6S" Link
Jim OShaughnessy: "Good discussion with @StabilityAI's Founder and CEO @EMostaque that covers the possibilities and potential dangers of truly open AI. We're working hard to mitigate the dangers to deliver AI for all. Generative A.I. Is Here. Who Should Control It? https://t.co/ng7fNxE77Z" Link
Robby: "There is a LOT going on in software infra🧐 AI coders are on the rise (@GitHubCopilot), new personas are going open source (@penpotapp) & there are new programs to promote serverless adoption (@Cloudflare) We dig into these & more in our latest review👇 https://t.co/xd9xfzL08c" Link
JJ: "Today, only developers really care if something is open source --- but just for technical reasons --- largely they want to be in control of the tech instead of blindly accepting the reverse! Eventually, all humans on the internet will share this view --- but for different reasons." Link
Chad Hurley: "YouTube and Twitter should be an open distribution protocol like email." Link
💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)
No COSS Liquidity announcements this week.
🛠️ COSS Jobs
- 6,739 jobs and 249 companies hiring! Link
📊 $COSS - Public Markets
$COSS markets up 8.10% last week
Latest $COSS markets snapshot below as of market close last Friday courtesy of Koyfin.
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