"The news over the past few years in open source establish it as the natural way to release software. If there’s anything else you can do to earn money–whether setting up a social environment like Second Life, putting up ads like Google, or selling hardware like Intel–you really need to search hard for a reason to keep software proprietary."

This weekend I was reminded of another reason that I love open source software: A transparent development process. Only in open source software will you be able to talk directly to the developers of a software project and give them your input. This is one of the reasons that open source projects tend to focus specifically on the requirements of the users. Let me tell you my story...

Open source software is obviously extremely interesting to companies from a utilitarian viewpoint: it means they can reduce costs and – more significantly – decrease their dependence on single suppliers. But there's another reason why businesses should be following the evolution of this field:

Money Manager Ex© is a free, open-source, cross-platform, easy-to-use personal finance software. It primarily helps organize one's finances and keeps track of where, when and how the money goes. It is also a great tool to get a bird's eye view of your financial worth.

For some reason, people still can't seem to get their heads around the idea that you can make money, big money, from FOSS (Free Software/Open Source). It's a pity that more of them couldn't have been in New York City this week for the O'Reilly Money:Tech conference.

Open source is no longer a novelty, even within the largest corporations. Today, 53% of businesses use open-source software, according to a recent CIO.com survey. However, not enough of those businesses are contributing code back to the open-source community, said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, at the Red Hat Summit.

Open Source Software being cheaper vis-a-vis proprietary software and the low cost reason of the same is one of the primary incentives for people across the globe for Linux adoption.

Zack Urlocker of MySQL fame was at the Stanford Accel Symposium earlier this week and, along with some other open-source heavyweights, participated on a panel that attempted to cull some lessons learned in building open-source businesses.

To be honest, for a couple of years now I have been pretty skeptical about the future of Free and Open Source software in Finnish schools and education sector in general. In Finland we have a lot of open source expertise and know-how. We have developers. I also assume that majority of the (liberally) higher educated people in Finland, at least know what is "Open Source" and "Linux".