It's nice to be able to write about something besides Microsoft. Interface21, the company behind the exceptional Spring Framework, just nabbed $21M from Benchmark Capital. Peter Fenton, formerly at Accel (and investor in JBoss), did the deal. This is great for open source, and obviously great for Rod and the Interface21 team. Spring is one of my favorite open source projects, and will get a boost from this cash It’s nice to be able to write about something besides Microsoft. Interface21, the company behind the exceptional Spring Framework, just nabbed $21M from Benchmark Capital. Peter Fenton, formerly at Accel (and investor in JBoss), did the deal.This is great for open source, and obviously great for Rod and the Interface21 team. Spring is one of my favorite open source projects, and will get a boost from this cash injection:I think the biggest change you will see is an increase in our investment in the Spring Portfolio. Looking from the outside, with Spring 2.0, Spring 2.1, Spring OSGi, Spring Web Flow, the new Spring Batch and the other portfolio projects charging along, I’m sure our pace of development looks pretty impressive. But inside, we are convinced that we can do even more, and even more quickly. That requires increased and dedicated investment on product development. We are also planning to grow our sales and marketing capability. Currently Interface21 has NO dedicated marketing, and only one full-time sales person in the entire company. It’s amazing that we have grown at the rate that we have, but, as a product company, we clearly need to invest more in these areas.Open source – commercial or community – is an indomitable force. Spring (which Alfresco and others use) is among the best projects that open source has to offer. Fortunately, Benchmark (and Peter) has a tradition of keeping its open source portfolio companies open source. Spring’s users, therefore, should see added benefits to the investment, and not a closing off of the code. Open Source