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

Let's face it, open source software runs the Internet. Without it we wouldn't have basic services like DNS, or even the web server that's sending you this page. This isn't a new phenomenon. People have been writing and distributing OSS software since the Internet was born. I'm always amused when people characterize it as a new-fangled thing.

So my question is simple: Who is the open source big dog? The answer to the question as stated is likely IBM. You're welcome Savio. :-) IBM, of course, benefits nicely from its investments in Apache and Eclipse and has done a lot to make Linux what it is today. But IBM is not betting the farm on open source, so let me tweak my question to be: Who is the open source [as a business] big dog?

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?

Though the open-source movement isn't going to die anytime soon, it's looking a little ragged at the edges. And with the appearance of the onerous GPL v3 and the slow deterioration of the popular Firefox browser, I now wonder if open source may have been a fad, or perhaps just a more elaborate iteration of the shareware phenomenon in the 1980s.

Big tech companies don't always mean what they say when they make promises about open source.

Ohloh, a community site for open source developers, is making its tools open source, including the Web site itself.

Anyone following the open source phenomenon can’t help but be amazed at what appears to be volunteerism on a massive scale for corporate gain. Almost every company in the world has some strands of open source code floating around their company.

We don't yet have robots quite as advanced as Star Wars' C3PO or some of the robots seen in the sci-fi flick Blade Runner, but did you know that there is an open source effort underway to produce them? Well, sort of. RobotCub is a site that houses an open source software repository and many other resources that open source developers are using to advance a humanoid baby robot, dubbed iCub.