The NVA Blog

Just got back from a great Boulder Open Coffee Club meeting this morning. The format of the event has evolved to having a semi-structured discussion at the beginning on a hot topic. The usual networking and schmooze-fest ensued after the discussion.  Today’s topic was open source and various GPL licenses, presented by Doug Young of Morphlix. Very timely as a bunch of the TechStars folks were in attendance and many of us are using open development platforms and GPL code within the apps.

A few of the nuggets of advice I heard:

• There are a number of open source license models to be aware of. Mozilla, GPL, LGPL, etc. Be aware of which license is attached to the code you are using because it will matter at some point if you are successful.
• The mozilla (MPL) license is the simplest/weakest of the reciprocal (GPL-style) licenses and is gaining popularity.
• If you are building an application or web based service with GPL code, keep track of what you are using very carefully. One suggestion was to keep in your repository separate libraries for 100% internally developed, pure 3rd party, and modified GPL code to ensure you have it all straight.
• GPL v3 is being drafted and has some important changes that should benefit everyone, but also has new implications for usage. I won’t try to outline it all here. Richard Stallman gave a talk in Brussels, Belgium back on April 1st on the latest draft (discussion draft 3). The transcript does a great job outlining the major differences between v2 and v3.
• Many early-stage startups either ignore completely or poorly track their usage of open source components. While ignorance can be bliss for awhile, be aware that your GPL compliance will come to the forefront if you get off the ground. The last thing you want is to have auditors crawling through your source code to find tons of 3rd party stuff in there that wasn’t documented or tracked. This has the potential to cost you a ton of time and money, or worse derail the acquisition all together.
• Compliance is more important than perfect tracking. Ensure that what you use, you adhere to the terms of the license to maintain your IP rights and ownership over what you create. It sure would suck to find out weeks before a supposed acquisition you don’t actually own the software you made because you violated GPL terms.
• FYI - for companies using GPL/open components in their projects, check out OpenLogic, a Boulder-area company who provides both software and services for enterprise-grade open source deployment. This is going to become a must-have pretty soon.

The BOCC is turning into a pretty solid and useful event and everyone is really friendly. There are a good number of experienced techies and entrepreneurs in attendance typically, so in addition to interesting and educational discussions it’s an opportunity to get good advice for the price of a latte.

This one is going to be good, folks. Ask the VC, the venture-world blog that is quickly becoming an indispensable resource for the tech start-up community, is going to do a series on start-up compensation. Expect opinion and details around how much executives should get paid, what good and bad deal terms are, and some thoughtful commentary on how to calculate and justify comp. packages at various stages of company development.

The topic of compensation comes up all the time, naturally. NVA deals with a lot of early stage companies where cash is king and our guidance is often to preserve as much capital as possible to fund business operations and hit milestones. Investors and Founders want to see tangible results for the early, high-risk money that goes into a company. Having even an extra 10k/month go out the door in the form of cash/benefits/expenses can have a direct impact on features, customer acquisition, and runway. The flip side is that even smart, talented and motivated people cannot work for partial salaries forever, and many deferred-comp deals evaporate. Every situation can have unique dynamics that require going deeper than a set of guiding principals, but we are all for having the community reading from the same play book.

The hot news this morning is that MSFT and YHOO are “re-entering formal talks”. I’m not surprised by this at all, but I don’t love the concept of a MSFT owned Yahoo. YHOO is up $5 bucks right now, already.

Lets see…

• MSFT keeps losing to Google in the deal wars (AOL, DoubleClick, YouTube, etc)
• Yahoo has been struggling to find the spark that got them on the map in the first place. Semel has been under fire bigtime lately.
• Google is marching towards a complete set of web-based MS Office replacements, unchecked.
• Google keeps plugging away at the G-OS too…
• MSFT would own both MSN/Live and Yahoo - totally changes the marketshare landscape. Does Google cry anti-trust?

Links: Forbes, NY Post