I had the pleasure of coffee Bob McWhirter (blog) yesterday. Bob is the guy behind codehause.org, home to open source projects such as Groovy, Jaxen, and ActiveMQ among many others. Bob recently founded OpenXource, a consulting and product company focused on helping companies move closed source software to open source.
Helping with the strategy and execution of moving closed source to open source is an undeserved market according to Bob, and I agree with him. Folks like Sourcelabs and Spikesource are going the other direction, helping companies bring open source in. I don't know of anyone else specializing in the other way around.
And while perhaps a smaller market, it's a much harder problem IMHO. I had a taste of this helping Orbeon transition their presentation server product to open source, and of course their biz model too. Oh yeah, that thing. They've since joined ObjectWeb and their community and biz is on the rise, but going it alone, without the benefit of experience, is difficult.
Behind raw adoption numbers, the next most important metric of an open source project's success is the size and health of its dev community. OpenXource is addressing this with a hosted community service called Xircles. Its Open source community in a box, leveraging the insights gained starting, growing, and managing codehaus.org. They've got to differentiate from the Collabnet's, sourceforge's, and GForge of the world, but there seems to be room to innovate there for sure. This is a needed service, and I wish Bob and OpenXource success!
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