Here's the one-hundred fifty-first 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 $38.2M in funding announcements from Prophecy and TabbyML, AMD's acquisition of Nod.ai, LLaVA as an open challenger to ChatGPT, and applications open for the second cohort of GitRound starting in December 2023!
Enjoy!
💰 COSS Funding: $38.2M
- Prophecy, a tool for data transformation and engineering, announced their $35M led by Insight Partners and SignalFire. Link
- TabbyML, a GitHub Copilot competitor, announced their $3.2M Seed led by Yunqi Partners and ZooCap. Link
📚 COSS Content
JJ --- e/acc: "Open Source Chips (RISC-V). Open Source Money (tokens + crypto). Open Source AI (open data + weights). These movements represent the future of computation, currency and intelligence for humanity. ALL three are currently under attack by the US (and other global nations), industry ("Open"AI, Inflection, Anthropic + others), deeply misled academic extremists and also wide swaths of society. NOW is the time to educate, speak up, vote and campaign strongly against those who seek to slow the rate of progress and instead encourage complacency, stasis and death. Nations who embrace open source AI (including training on all copyrighted data), crypto and RISC-V will profoundly leapfrog nations who take the opposite stance --- much faster than anyone can predict." Link
Kevin Xu (interconnected.blog): "All these attempts to restrict open source, first in AI, then in chip design (i.e. RISC-V), are: ill-advised, short-sighted, bad for innovation, and impossible to enforce. Or in one word: dumb!" Link
Nasdaq Exchange: "In partnership with @SiliconSlopes, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of @Automattic and co-founder of Wordpress shares with @NasdaqExchange how open source technology companies are fostering creative freedom and a sense of community among users. #SlopesSummit23" Link
Steven Tey: "crowd.dev is amazing. It's an open-source Common Room/Orbit alternative that lets you discover valuable insights from your product's community. Best part -- they're using @calcom for their demo booking page" Link
JJ --- e/acc: "Good Riddance! Horrible CEO. We welcome all the disrespected and dejected Unity users to the @GodotEngine community. Meanwhile, it was a WISE move of the Unity board to appoint former @RedHat CEO @JWhitehurst as interim CEO. streetaccount.com/pressrelease.a..." Link
This Week in Startups: "FULL PODCAST, LIVE ON @X @bgurley joins @sundeep and @Jason to talk open-source vs closed AI: -- incumbents tend to support regulation -- which can lead to regulatory capture -- BUT, this is inverted in ai right now -- massively funded startups (openai, anthropic, inflection) are supporting regulation -- with megacaps like $META going full open-source" Link
Daniel Jeffries: "The third battle for open source begins..." Link
Bindu Reddy: "The folks who are hating on open-source LLMs are the same ones who built sub-par proprietary LLMs If you raise billions and your model is worse than the SOTA open-source LLM, you have a problem So they fear monger, claim "safety" issues and want to shut down open-source When in fact, nothing bad has happened after Llama-2 has been open-sourced. In fact we have evidence to the contrary - It has kick-started research around understanding of these LLMs and making them more transparent It's sad to see folks in Silicon Valley curb our enthusiasm and innovation for their own selfish reasons." Link
JJ --- e/acc: "In 2022, 90% of Postgres maintenance was done by one of 40 people. Postgres is used by tens of millions of people and powers likely $1 TRILLION dollars or more in applications. That's what open source capital efficiency looks like. redmonk.com/jgovernor/2023..." Link
Didier Lopes: "OpenBB team is comprised of 18 FTE. We have 8 products: OpenBB Platform, OpenBB Terminal, OpenBB Bot, OpenBB Terminal Pro, OpenBB Excel Add-In, OpenBB Hub, OpenBB Docs and Marketing website. This means that on average we have around 2 people working on each product. This is particularly wild when you look into the complexity associated with each of these products and being at the forefront of innovation. That average includes not only engineers but design, product and marketing. In addition, our Discord community has 14k+ people and we often get praised regarding how good our support is. Regardless of our future, I am proud of the team we put together and how efficiently we operate. It would take a much larger company well over 5 years to build what we built in 2." Link
JJ --- e/acc: "Musk "Idiot Index": a measure of how much more the cost of a product is relative to the cost of its basic fundamental elements. Big spread, bad product. Applying this process to digital products is called open source." Link
Didier Lopes: ""I coded my way into payroll" Someone asked me how we hired one of our best employees. Honestly, I didn't know. I didn't remember the company before this person was on the team. I remember reviewing this engineer's PRs before OpenBB was OpenBB and chatting with him on Discord. Next thing I knew he was part of our team. It felt natural. I didn't ask about his background. I didn't ask for referrals. I didn't ask for his CV. All the things that you would think are the first step in the hiring process. Maybe I was too naive, or maybe I just cared about sharing the same values as this person and that they shipped high-quality code, fast. Open source allows this. The reality is that: - This person is a high school dropout, was working as a barman and I doubt he ever wrote a CV. Most (if not all companies) would have skipped on him. The ACTUAL reality: - He's one of the top 5 smartest people I've ever worked with, genuinely funny, has a kind heart, and is a big part of OpenBB's success story. My point is that advocating for diversity is not enough. We need to go beyond categorizing people based on race and gender to meet quotas. We need to enable people to show who they are - regardless of what a document says. Open source is the solution. I foresee many more people like this out there, who "coded their way into the payroll" and there's beauty in that. openbb.co/blog/meet-the-..." Link
VentureBeat: "The open-source alternatives to GPT-4 Vision are coming venturebeat.com/business/the-o..." Link
VentureBeat: "Replit brings open source AI developer tools to all users venturebeat.com/programming-de..." Link
Peer Richelsen: "my secret COSS masterplan is to acquire all beautiful OSS projects that use Cal Sans and bring them into one berkshire hathaway-type of Holding Company Umbrella" Link
Spacedrive: "Spacedrive is now available for download on macOS, Linux, Windows and as a Docker container. You can download now from spacedrive.com" Link
W4 Games: "Last GDC was a blast, and we'll be at the next GDC 2024, sponsoring an even larger booth for @godotengine. This time, we're building a Godot Pavilion to host many companies from the #GodotEngine ecosystem. We're looking for co-exhibitors to join us! w4games.com/2023/10/11/cal..." Link
Plane: "Craziness at Plane in September! 17k+ stars Issue drafts for accidental closures Quick-add issues for all layouts Bring all issues across the workspace with global views Want more details? Read our round-up plane.so/blog/september..." Link
Tauri: "So proud to see such an amazing piece of technology being built with @TauriApps. Congratulations to the whole @spacedriveapp team!!!" Link
John Carmack: "Be an Open Source Absolutist! It is hard to overstate how much value Open Source Software has added to the world, and how broadly empowering it is. Operating systems, development tools, core libraries, and critical applications -- a great many of the software tools used by the most powerful companies in the world are the exact same ones available to hospitals, students, and everyone else. For free. And not just to use, but to inspect, modify, extend, and redistribute. Back in the 90s, there were legal battles in the US over software capable of strong encryption. There were scare stories about how terrorists and child pornographers would use the technology to evade justice, but people were also wearing T-shirts printed with forbidden code to mock the idea of algorithms too dangerous to share. It was stupid, and I was ashamed of the regulatory state, but we got better. Open Source AI is in many people's crosshairs today. They believe that giving free access to state of the art algorithms and models without any guardrails constitutes a danger to society, that the public can't be entrusted with a research model that wasn't hammered into a box of their designated dimensions. "As a large language model, I cannot..." Unfortunately, this is actually inside the Overton Window of possibilities right now. Let's push it out. In the spirit of the first amendment, congress should make no law abridging the freedom to release open source software." Link
Joey DeBruin: "Excited to drop E2 of the @withBackdrop podcast: "Frameworks for Building an Enduring Open Source Business" with @JosephJacks_ of @OSSCapital, @peer_rich of @calcom, and @templecrash of @parallelTCG Highlight clips below, including this on why to launch early in open source" Link
Formbricks: "Open Source Design isn't really a thing... yet! We're pumped to have merged the first end-to-end community developed feature: From request to design to code implementation Excited to be introducing designers (and soon content writers) into the OSS Win-Win Loop™" Link
JJ --- e/acc: "Today is a great day to apply to @git_round GRQ124, our second cohort. We will accept a minimum of 5 more startups in December 2023. Apply now: formbricks.com/clmuttx5tgcngo..." Link
JJ --- e/acc: "Tauri adoption is supernova (pun intended) but to see one portfolio company tech powering another is really special. And kind thanks to @jamiepine for introducing me to Daniel the co-creator of Tauri." Link
OSS Capital: "Today we crossed 1,000,000 @GitHub stars across our portfolio. Here's to the next hundred million. Onwards." Link
Rémi Verschelde: "As @reduzio presented at the last GDC, with @W4Games and various other companies, we're building an open ecosystem for game development around #GodotEngine. A big step to strengthen that ecosystem is to join forces to make a big Godot splash at GDC 2024! Do you want in?" Link
JJ --- e/acc: "GitHub co-founder working on a platform for game developers" Link
JJ --- e/acc: "Based on the aggregate value of our portfolio, each GitHub star is worth around $7,000~ ..." Link
Jatin Sandilya: "@revertdotdev APIs gets as flexible as your CRM I'm excited to announce the release of the Field Mapping API in @revertdotdev that allows you the engineer to go beyond the unified schema that we offered so far. THIS IS HUGE! Checkout our blog to know why! blog.revert.dev/field-mapping-..." Link
JJ --- e/acc: "ALL source available licenses are nonsensical and redundant / indistinguishable from open source in the age of AI. Code-gen LLMs can read the available source and reproduce it with small semantic changes in the same or different languages ... and License those outputs as FOSS." Link
JJ --- e/acc: "Only 700~ more followers for @godotengine to enter the 100K club. LFG!" Link
💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)
- TechCrunch: "AMD acquires Nod.ai to bolsters its AI software ecosystem tcrn.ch/3tp6MGZ by @kyle_l_wiggers" Link
🛠️ COSS Jobs
- 3,744 jobs and 294 companies hiring! Link
- defunkt: "Do you think making games should be more fun and rewarding? Come help us make it happen. We're hiring Full Stack Engineers, Graphics Engineers, Systems Engineers, and Product Marketing! If you love games, you'll love what we're building. https://void.dev/jobs/" Link
📊 $COSS - Public Markets
- $COSS markets down 3.43% last week
- Latest $COSS markets snapshot below as of market close last Friday courtesy of Koyfin.
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