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Cover image for COSS Weekly Issue #4 💥
Joseph (JJ) Jacks for COSS Community

Posted on • Edited on • Originally published at coss.media

COSS Weekly Issue #4 💥

COSS Weekly, Issue #4: 💥November 8th, 2020

Welcome to the fourth issue of the COSS Weekly, the global Commercial Open-Source ecosystem newsletter brought to you every Sunday by Joseph Jacks and team at COSS Media, OSS Capital and the organizers of Open Core Summit.

Each week, we neatly summarize the latest happenings in COSS, often including objective commentary across primarily the following four areas: Funding, Content, Liquidity, Data.


📚 COSS Content

RIP to Dan Kohn. Your kindness and generosity impacted countless lives. Link

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab develop fastest-ever open-source intrusion detection system, maintaining speeds of 100 gigabits per second on a single server. "We created one pizza box-sized machine to do the work of a whole room of servers." Link

Because Open Source fundamentally changes the way we create and consume technology, attempts to market size OSS based on proprietary tech understimates OSS's potential by orders of magnitude. Link

Vinay Iyengar's State of COSS: 46 companies with $100m+ in revenue, raised an average of $262m in venture capital, typically 1.6 years between project creation and company creation, most popular license is Apache 2.0 (37%). Link

Dagster announces the dagster-dgt library, a new first-class integration between Dagster and dgt. "We view Dagster and dgt as complimentary technologies, not competing technologies." Link

OpenSSF releases Security Scorecards to auto-generate a "security score" for open-source projects. Link

VotingWorks, a non-partisan non-profit startup backed by Y Combinator, aims to rebuild election systems with open-source tools and technology. Link

Odoo announces new milestone: $100M per year in billing. "Cash flow is not our bottleneck anymore, it's the recruitment of R&D developers." Link

Why COSS is the next $2 trillion tech category. Keynote presentation by Joseph Jacks at Open Source Business Forum, October 2020. Link

Google announces background video features for Google Meet, made possible by WebAssembly. Link

What is Commercial Open Source Software by Webiny. Link

Software Freedom Conservancy seeking employee to work daily with FOSS projects and their leaders. Link

Red Hat's closed-crust is often considered an "insurance policy" with indemnification. This is a powerful value proposition vs "selling features." Other COSS companies could wisely follow suit. Link

One of the most brittle, vulnerable, and proprietary closed-core bastions in software: Temenos' domination in core banking. $12B+ valuation, $1B~ revenue, very slow place of innovation, monopoly. COSS can be very effective here! Link

Only 30~ software companies have reached $1B+ in revenue.  9 of them raised essentially zero VC/outside funding on path to success. Lesson? Customers have more money than outside investors, raise money from customers if you can. (These 30 companies generate $330B+ in annual customer spending, and the entire VC asset class is $157B~). Link


📈 COSS Data

  • 🌐 YC COSS: For the first time ever in 2020, 15~ COSS startups have gone through YC in a single year representing 30%+ of the total (50~ since 2006). Our YC COSS dataset tracks and provides granular data on the growing but still small COSS YC alumni.
  • 🏦 COSS Funding 2020: This dataset tracks the latest funding events for all stages of COSS companies, mostly in private markets. For 2020-2021+
  • 📊 COSS Index: The well-known COSSI sheet for the exclusive $100M+ revenue club of COSS companies. New data points and growth happening weekly.
  • 🌩️ AWS COSS: List of COSS services on AWS. Continuously evolving. We plan to offer similar datasets for Azure, GCP, and other major clouds.
  • 📈 COSS IPO: Analysis of every COSS IPO since 1999.

As usual, we end with this graphic depicting what we think the next Multi-Trillion-Dollar category in business will be:

COSS Weekly is brought to you via COSS Media, produced by OSS Capital (the first and only COSS-dedicated early-stage investor and platform for COSS founders.


Don't forget to sign-up for the second-annual FREE Open Core Summit 2020 Digital to meet with and learn from the leaders in COSS (enterprises, founders, investors, executives and more) on December 16-18th, 2020:
1 mission. 3 days. 10 tracks. 150+ speakers. 10,000+ attendees.

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