Increasing number of software applications are going the free/open-source way these days.

You could say that the software world is divided. There are 10 types of software philosophies. Those that are closed source and those that are open source. One thing I have noticed is that where there are cross platform programs there is a difference between the closed source and open source implementations.

With the news of Linspire's CNR coming soon to Ubuntu, and Automatix now offering a limited number of closed source, commercial applications, what possible consequences will this have on the Linux community and open source as a whole?

We, free (libre, as in freedom) software users are used to prefer open source software over closed source, and I think it’s great. My concern today is about distributed services (some people call it the cloud if you wish).

Why do companies use closed source applications that are tremendously more expensive, when they could probably get away with using open source solutions that are noticeably cheaper?

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.

Here’s an interesting bit of news from the blurred line between open and closed source software. Ubuntu sponsor Canonical has announced that it is reselling IBM’s DB2 Express-C database as both a standalone software package and as a software appliance with VMware. While Express-C is free as in beer, it is not free as in speech. Of course, if you want support it is not free at all.

There is both a perceptual and an actual channel of openness in software. Users value the freedom of mobility as very close to what coders value as the freedom of source code access. The only reason there is a real gap here is that closed source systems, like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., don't actually allow you freedom of movement. It merely feels like that because the application is free and, fiscally speaking, the barrier for entry or exit is zero.

Sun Microsystems is to open-source the last closed-source parts of Java, a move that should make it possible to fully integrate the software into Linux distributions.