In general VCs (venture^H^H^H^H^H^Hulture capitalists) are not the most liked groups of people. In most cases, they are clueless about the business they are putting money into (they do pretend that they know though). Yes, generalizations. If the shoe fits.

Having said that, it is interesting to read quotes from two VCs about how they are ask the question about “why are you not using open source” of their investee companies.

I like the quote from the former M$ high flyer, Brad Silverberg, that “his (investment) firm is more likely to invest in open source than in .Net-based startups”.

Are VCs growing up? Back in 1999, when I was in the middle of a starting up a educational services company, iqmind.com, we had to deal with numerous VCs and almost all of them could not understand why I architected the systems using LAMP (though not exclusively, I did reluctantly allow the use of BEA Weblogic and Oracle DB). In fact, one of the early angel investors (who made his fortune from Netscape going public) was belittling me on saving money and that it was not right to go with open source technology saying that “you need Solaris and Netscape servers for credibility and scalability”. Yeah, right.