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Toni Schneider, lately the man behind Yahoo's Developer Network, will leave the cozy confines of Sunnyvale for the dual joys of heading a startup and partnering in a venture capital firm.

The open source movement provided an opportunity to build a service industry around a freely available product. Firms like Red Hat offered handholding to enterprises who wanted to have someone to yell at should an open source product misbehave.

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg's new business, Automattic, offers professional services related to his projects. Om Malik exclusively reported Schneider will serve as Automattic CEO, along with his participation in the new VC company called True Venture.

Automattic described its business on its website:

There has been quite a bit of demand for professional services around our projects, and we're happy to provide them for select clients.

We can provide enterprise support, priority updates, training, and consulting for WordPress, WordPress MU, and bbPress.
WordPress has grown dramatically in its acceptance by bloggers, and even figures in the blogging efforts at the New York Times. Other projects include the WordPress.com hosted-blog site, the Akismet spam protection service, and bbPress forum software.

Schneider hinted on his blog that he may do for Yahoo what Doug Edwards is doing for Google with his Xooglers blog, and offer a peek at Yahoo's inner workings:

I might write more about what it's like to be inside Yahoo when I've had some distance from it, but I did have a great time, learned a lot of new things and will miss a lot of the really smart, nice and dedicated people I got to know and work with at Yahoo.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.