Like many multinational corporations, Microsoft has embraced social networking as a means of making customers feel like participants, not just end users, in a Microsoft community.  When it comes to community-building, however, Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle against the open-source world, which was built around social networking before it was called social networking.

The new frontiers for open source companies are social networking-related applications and Software as a Service, said Paul Sterne, CFO of Open-Xchange. "The appetite now in the venture community is to identify companies, like ours, that sell open source products into the Software as a Service environment," he said.

The popular social networking site Facebook just announced a Chinese version, but similar Chinese-based Web sites such as Xiaonei and Hainei have been struggling there. However, since April, UCenter Home, an open source social network service based on PHP and MySQL, is pushing open social networking in China.

At stake here is far more than SCO's existence. It is the front line in a battle between two diametrically opposed ideologies. In the red corner we have open source - the idea that software should be freely available and that it is best developed by a community of interested individuals who incrementally add to it for the common good.

Nine out of ten software-as-a-service providers will rely on open source software by 2010 to save money, but the cost savings likely won't be passed onto customers, Gartner says in a new research note.

Nine out of ten software-as-a-service providers will rely on open source software by 2010 to save money, but the cost savings likely won't be passed onto customers, Gartner says in a new research note.

Industry analysts are scratching their heads after Microsoft recently decided to join a project measuring how people are using open source software. The Open Source Census is run by OpenLogic, a company that aims to help organisations obtain, use and control open source software -- programs where the underlying code is open to everyone to see and to share ideas on improving it.

Open source software (OSS) has now become a well recognised and utilised brand. A brand that, if we were to get a broad sweeping perception poll on, would generally stand for free, fair and cost effective. However, despite this growth, the battle between open source and traditional software still rages on whereby the pros and cons for each can be endlessly debated.

Instead of hauling around boxes of candy bars or gift wrap the next time your school or non-profit group needs to raise money, why not offer a CD of open source software in exchange for a donation?