Matt Asay, blogger, Open Source advocate, founder of Alfresco, Soccer fan and at least around these parts of the wood, a role model, has written a post on his CNet blog entitled: “Saturation point for enterprise open source?”

In his post, Matt raises the question whether current day commercial Open Source ventures, SupportMatrix being one example he gives, are focusing on niche markets rather then CRM, ERP, ECM and the likes and worries that such niche markets are not big enough to sustain Open Source development leaving it prey to un-software service companies such as Google, Yahoo and friends. Matt also ties this to a recent drop in VC investments in Open Source companies.

Well, Matt, first of all, thanks for the mention. You are absolutely right - we are certainly not “… the Open Source X”. There is no such X quite yet in the proprietary world. We’re rather proud of that, but it’s quite independent of the really interesting question - how big is the market for what we’re doing, that is, software that helps making big support center manageable and technical support better?

The truth, and please don’t ever mention that we said this to our investors, is that we haven’t got the foggiest idea.

Oh, we are well rehearsed in reciting the numbers in the harsh light of the slide projector: “… there are 100 big support centers per region, we have 4 regions (EMEA, North America, Australia and Far East), at an average 500 operators per big support center and a price tag of 5k$ per user we get a total market cap of One… Billion… Dollars! ” [insert little finger in side of mouth here for full effect].

But as old Field Marshall Helmuth Carl Bernard von Moltke used to say: “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy .” and this is true today or marketing plans of start ups just as it was true for the Prussian army back in the old Field Marshall days. We’ll find out how big the market is once we manage to sell enough of our stuff to actually have enough meaningful dots in the graph. Until then, it’s all hearsay and wishful thinking.

You see, because we have no idea how big the market size really is or how much money we’re going to make, it makes perfect sense to try and throw as little money and resources on the problem to start with and the best way for a software start up to start small and remain frugal is is to use Open Source software. That way, if it turns out the market really is smaller then we thought, no harm done. We’ll just move along to something else.

If we do succeed however, we’re completely based on Open Source software and committed to the Open Source movement for good, and through the magical pixie dust of the GPL, even if we get bought out, this will not change in a major way.

In a way, Open Source works like an angel, except it doesn’t invest money - it invests IP. If the investment went sour, no big deal. But if it went well, we’ll pay back, with interest and a premium, IP to feed our Open Source angel next investment.

So don’t worry Matt. Open Source is fine and plays Y-Combinator with the coolest startups of the world. Losing doesn’t cost it a penny, and scoring produces hordes of paid developers to maintain it’s riches. World domination is proceeding according to schedule.