SURVEYS that encompass many Web sites cost a lot of money/effort/time to produce and the gain from them is mere unless a particular party gains. It is always very, very important to check where the money comes from. It's valuable to at least understand the business model.

Venture Capitalists, drooling over the financial success of Red Hat, are investing a serious chunk of change into other OS projects geared to the enterprise. In turn, those projects are adopting business models that look a lot like their proprietary counterparts.

Recently Microsoft screwed themselves over. We have MS Money 2006 from back when I was still getting into Linux and hadn’t convinced my wife completely about how much better it was than Windows. Recently we switched to back to a credit card where we previously used to download the transactions from within MS Money.

We hear a lot about this or that open source business model, but rarely does anyone explain in a simple, succinct way exactly how an open source company makes money. In this video, though, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst does exactly that.

"It seems Microsoft has contributed some money to the Apache Foundation. Unbelievable? [...] And, finally? Of course, they transform into a Free Software company. Which they will have to do, in any case. And with the money and user base they have, they can easily drive the others, such as Red Hat and SuSE out of business or at least become the dominant FS company. Not likely? Who can say?

Since its inception in 2004, Ubuntu has been the beneficiary in what seems like a bottomless money pit for South African entrepreneur, Mark Shuttleworth via his commercial support and development venture, Canonical. How long can anyone keep pumping money into a project that might not ever turn a profit?

Last week, I wrote about the somewhat-vague definition of the open core business model, and how it compared to the dual-license business model. Open core, like dual licenses, are all part of the whole "ways-to-make-money-faster-with-open-source-software" genre of business, but they are not the same thing.

Going green doesn't mean joining some radical organization, using pig waste to power your data center or flying the ecology flag at your place of business. It does mean doing your part to save electricity, fossil fuel and your own money.

The money just keeps on rolling into Redmond and Microsoft's partners, almost faster than ever before!