What I thought I wanted to do was take a look at how tech evangelism really effects the IT industry - especially open source. We have all been evangelists at one point or another, but for some of us, especially in the open source world, being an evangelist is looked upon poorly.

In reading through "Top 10 Responses to Why I Should Use Linux? A Linux Evangelists' Reference," I couldn't help but think that Linux needs better evangelists for its desktop crusade.

True believers will tell you that open source browsers are much less likely to be exploited by hackers. Microsoft evangelists will just as vehemently argue the easy availability of open source browser code actually encourages tampering. Now that Firefox is gaining popularity, obscurity is no longer a defense, insist fence-sitters.

Open source has infiltrated so many levels of IT over the past decade. It has been a slow process, however slowly but surely it has become a normality. And even though many companies are adopting open source software, they are hesitant to bring open source developers into the fold. Let’s take a look at some good reasons to hire open source developers.

So what happened to open source as a business? There was a wave of “commercial open source” companies that were going to change the world, including SugarCRM, Alfresco, Jasper, Pentaho, and ActiveGrid, a company I started in 2003 to bring open source software into businesses.

2009 was very good for open-source businesses. Sure, there was the very public news of Red Hat's gravity-defying year, along with Novell's SUSE Linux business climbing each quarter, but what of the still-private open-source companies?

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.

Anti-Linux evangelists try to level many claims against the free open source operating system Linux. Arguments against the base cost (nothing!) or about the turnaround time to repair security exploits don’t work. But there is one item in the anti-Linux arsenal which often hits hard: lack of support. Here's why it makes good Linux techies groan when they see it.

Proponents of the open source and proprietary software sectors have clashed over a proposal to support multiple standards for the country's e-government projects.