2. Company and Management

When you look at the founders and management teams at a COSS company you often see a common situation:

• The founders, managers, and many of the staff at Pentaho (open source business intelligence) have worked at Hyperion, Business Objects, and Cognos (proprietary business intelligence) for many years.
• The founders of Alfresco (open source content management software) are ex-employees of Documentum (proprietary content management software).
• The founders of SugarCRM (open source customer relationship management software) are all ex-employees of E.piphany (proprietary customer relationship management software).

These people are not just ‘interested’ in the problem, solving the problem is their chosen career. They have worked at proprietary vendors in their domain for many years and are bringing both passion and experience to the COSS company.

Commercial open source companies are founded by passionate, experienced leaders of that domain.