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.

A census of open source developers has provided a sharp reminder of the necessity of commercially viable open source companies, and also how important it is that commercially viable open source companies employ good people to write open source. This probably isn't news to Reg readers, for whom it might be bleeding obvious - perhaps even tautological.

As I mentioned in my previous post on this topic, Open Source and open technology trends continue to swing in one direction (up and to the right). Along this ever-growing open technology spectrum lie various projects and companies who hope to gain a competitive advantage through some type of open collaboration initiative.

Open source software has a lot to offer the business world. Aside from the fact that they’re generally free, many open source programs are more secure, reliable and customizable than their proprietary counterparts. In fact, many large companies, including big names like Amazon, Google, and Yahoo, run their servers with Linux rather than Windows.

Whenever I write about Microsoft here I usually get a few comments asking me, with varying degrees of politeness, why I am wasting electrons on this subject on a site devoted to GNU/Linux. The reason I do this – and why I am about to do it again – is that whether we like it or not, Microsoft remains probably the single most important external factor in the free software world.

The open-source development model can can be powerful and incredibly beneficial for any software development project. Yet, even most open-source projects do not follow this style of development. Today, I want to talk a bit about why this is the case, and what can be done to set your project on the right path to enjoy the advantages of the open-source development process.

“Open Source” advocate: «...I associate much more with the "Open Source" (also as Richard defines it) camp, and am open to the existence and use of proprietary software...» --

While open source business applications are gaining popularity, proprietary products are not yet being elbowed out the sales door. The reason, William Hurley, BMC Software's chief architect of open source strategy, believes is that many business people are more concerned with getting the job done than with who makes the tool.

Deishin Lee of Harvard Business School, and Professor Haim Mendelson of Stanford's Graduate School of Business, eloquently lay out a strategy in a recent paper for squashing open source competition. Ironically, it's also a road map for open source companies to use to defeat their entrenched and expensive rivals.