Late last week news service Telecom TV said it had confirmed that investors in virtual cloud software provider Mavenir, in its latest $100 million investment round, included both Qualcomm and Intel. You have to ask what’s in it for them in such an investment – sure it may simply just be a vote for Open RAN from their respective VC funds, but you must ask what each might have to directly gain from the relationship. The key is likely found in the past 40 years, during which “Open” has come to mean the opposite of proprietary, and is associated with cheap, rather than expensive. There is a playbook of cheats and cons to prevent any software marketplace from being entirely…