Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

It seems that giving your software away, a la open source, is becoming a good way to get VCs to give money away to you:

Cornelius Willis, vice president of marketing at SourceLabs, admits that the market is hot, with the year-old company occasionally receiving unsolicited calls from venture capital firms.

"We have a healthy level of investor interest, but it doesn't feel like a bubble to me," said Willis, who led sales and marketing at Qpass during the Internet boom years. "In order for the lemmings to jump over the cliff, there has to be a lot of lemmings headed in the same direction. In Seattle, we just don't have that many lemmings."

Despite the worries of a bubble, venture capitalists say that the open source movement represents a huge opportunity. And some believe that creative business models are now being formed that resolve one of the biggest issues for the VCs. That is: How do you make money on something that is developed and distributed for free?

Andy Dale, a partner with Buerk Dale Victor in Seattle, said open source software companies such as SugarCRM and MySQL have demonstrated the power of dual licensing agreements where they bundle together proprietary and open source software. Other open source companies are encouraging free downloads, but then receive revenue from technical support contracts.

For Dale, those innovative ideas help resolve the money making question.

"What is so great about open source, from an investor and an intellectual viewpoint, is that it creates whole new ways of thinking about business models," Dale said. "We are still at the early stage of understanding what the potential is, but five years from now, we will look back and realize that there all different ways to do this."