Continuing the ongoing discussion about open source software business models, Rich Sharples of Red Hat’s JBoss division weighs in on an issue I have with Savio Rodrigues’s categorization of open source users: namely the fact that it does not take into account the value of the application in question.

Should you believe Red Hat's claims that its new Exchange marketplace for "open source business applications" contains nothing but open source business applications? We say "no" - since not even Red Hat appears to have a good answer for this question.

When I first tell people about open source software, one of the most common questions I get is this: "I just don't understand why people would create software if they don't get paid for it!

A common question you hear from proprietary vendors when dismissing open source alternatives is “how many customers actually want access to the code anyway?” It is a question I put to an open source software vendor myself earlier this week while playing devil’s advocate.

I came across a post today in one of the mailing lists I frequent where the user asked "Why would anyone pay for something at is based on Open Source". This question comes up many many times in various projects and in various forms. I did post a reply to the message, hopefully helping to educate, but thought the question was worthy of deeper exploration.

Thanks to a recent column by my friend Andy Patrizio, I found out that there’s “been an ongoing debate among bloggers and industry observers over one simple question: Where are the open source billionaires?” OK, I’ll buy that some people think that’s a real question, but I think it says more about they don’t understand the connection between software development genius and what it take

Has open source been positive or negative for its primary (commercial) proponents? That's the question I asked myself yesterday about Red Hat, Sun, and Novell, and found the answer interesting. I looked at these three as they, more than any others, have results that can be isolated and directly attributed to open source.

This post from Matt Asay on whether open source needs consolidation asks an interesting question, and some of the comments that came in on it were interesting. This comment caught my eye: "No. Open source does not need consolidation. Open source needs product managers."

This may not be "the year of Linux on the desktop" -- and who knows, maybe it is -- but there's little to no question that this is a pivotal year for open source as a mainstream economic phenomenon in the tech world, as my colleague Charles Babcock has indicated. My big question is: what next?