I wouldn't mind being in a list with companies like Google and Salesforce.com, which is precisely the company Red Hat is keeping in its continued growth trajectory. Forbes just named Red Hat the 11th fastest-growing company in the United States. Red Hat's sales have grown 41 percent over the past five years.

Hal Steger and Alberto Onetti - both of mobile open-source leader Funambol - discuss open-source marketing in the Enterprise Open Source Journal. Well worth a read, especially for those who persist in believing that open source succeeds in the absence of good marketing. In fact, real commercial success in open source comes as a direct result of savvy marketing.

Steve Goodman, co-founder and CEO of network management startup PacketTrap Networks, is predicting that commercial open source companies are doomed to fail. Goodman's not railing against open source or commercial software, per se. It's converting the former into the latter that he sees as inherently flawed.

Openads, formerly known as phpAdsNew, is one of the more successful open source development projects. Its online advertising software is used by many thousands of domain owners who want to make a profit on their Web content by selling advertisements.

The United States Department of the Navy has adopted a new policy which requires that open source software must be considered in every software acquisition the Navy makes.

OpenLogic just announced that it had a good 2007. The company tripled its number of customers, and now counts three of the Fortune 10 as companies, with many more in the Fortune 500. Good for them. What is perhaps less appealing about the company's success is that it may be achieving its success at the expense of the projects that make it possible in the first place.

WE SAT with Pablo Cecconi from GIS unit at Buenos Aires government to learn more about the city's official map site, built with and running on open source software. He tells of its story, budget worries, hiring challenges and overloaded servers.

Open source fans are buzzing about Microsoft’s latest move to open its APIs, which follows along the path it has been on recently. Microsoft’s announced intention to open APIs to its Vista, .Net, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange and Sharepoint software is no-doubt big, but it also comes as more and more traditional software and even hardware vendors tailor their strategies to address the pervasiveness of open source software in the enterprise.

The UK's position as the open source laggard of Europe is preventing the growth of UK software industry and skills, according Alfresco, an open source enterprise content management company. Alfresco is a UK success story, counting top investment banks and the European Commission among its customers, yet only 5% of its business comes from its home turf.