Gartner has made 10 technology predictions for the next few years, and in the analyst firm's view, life has never been better for open source. Among the predictions: Apple will double its market share by 2011 and software-as-service will account for at least one-third of all business software spending by 2012.

The use of open source environments for enterprise software projects is growing at an unprecedented rate, with notable peaks of interest among financial services and public sector organizations. Indeed, the adoption of open source software is growing at a great clip, with worldwide revenue from standalone open source software having reached $1.8 billion in 2006, according to recent calculations from IDC. That figure is expected to reach $5.8 billion by 2011, representing a compound annual growth rate of 26 percent. As a result, IDC is calling open source "the most significant, all-encompassing, and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s."

Open source has become standard in Silicon Valley, with nearly every software startup planning to release at least some code. So far, they've found five main business models:

Classifying Open Source production models is not an academic curiosity, as result from recent conversations on how the development model affects at large the software life-cycle and, more important, the business strategy.

Open source will start to dominate software infrastructure for providers of SAAS within three years. For them it's almost a no-brainer, according to Gartner analyst Yefim Natis. ... Lower cost and better flexibility, compared to what's available from closed source, or proprietary software, are key factors for the growing popularity of open source in this segment of the market.

In a few years' time, almost all businesses will use open source, according to Gartner; even though IT managers may be unaware of it, and prefer to talk about fashions such as software as a service.

At least 80 percent of all commercial software products will include elements of open-source code by 2010, according to Mark Driver, vice president of research at Gartner.

Most software developers have little interest in entrepreneurship, but an open-source software project will survive and thrive only by delivering value into a market (users) with business partners (contributors) and against competitors (other open and closed source software). If you want to run a successful open-source project, it helps if you consider the key questions that apply when defining a commercial business model. I'll expand on Chesbrough's and Rosenbloom's list of 6 themes to demonstrate why.

"This paper presents several case studies to demonstrate how open source software can achieve long-term sustainability by adopting the relevant business models."