An investment venture has been set up which will try to replicate the model of Gluecode, an open source start-up recently acquired by IBM, with a fund dedicated solely to open source software. Looks like there is a lot of money flowing into the open source bucket.

The venture, called Simula Labs, will take open source development projects and seek to create businesses around them. The company, which intends to announce its formation on Monday, has gotten commitments from Redpoint Ventures and Mission Ventures to put in $10m-$15m (�5.4m-�8.2m) for six to eight start-ups during the next three years. Winston Damarillo, who founded Gluecode and was chairman when it was sold, will act as CEO of Simula Labs.

Increasingly, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are using open source software and a subscription-pricing model to build new companies. In particular, the area of open source infrastructure software, which is typically an expensive purchase for customers, has seen a great deal of activity.

One of the first ventures will be the creation of a company called LogicBlaze, which will be built around an open source project called ActiveMQ, Damarillo said. The ActiveMQ software is an open source version of standardised Java-based messaging software for sharing data between applications.

Prashanth RaiSource ZDNetTags: Open Source, Venture Capital.