Today, and with more retrospect to come on Monday, is our one year anniversary. Todd Ogasawara, with O'Reilly, kicks off the well wishes with a very thoughtful blog on the intersection of commercial and open source business models. You can read Todd's blog here: Belated Happy Birthday to Port 25! Is Microsoft "Getting" Open Source?
An excerpt:
"There’s a lot of business model experimentation going on in both camps. Red Hat probably led the way years ago when they stopped providing ISO files after Red Hat 9. Then, they embraced Fedora Core. And, now, well, I can’t figure out what Red Hat is doing with Fedora Core to be honest. SUSE moved in a nearly opposite direction after being acquired by Novell taking SUSE from for-fee only to providing an OpenSUSE edition with freely downloadable ISO files. And, well, of course, that partnership with Microsoft that generates a lot of heated debate. MySQL split their distribution to a free Community Edition and a for-fee Enterprise Edition that adds some interesting proprietary management applications to entice potential license purchasers. Marc Fleury cause a bunch of commotion a few years ago with the Professional Open Source initiative at JBoss (before being acquired by Red Hat) and paying lead programmers of Open Source projects (to be honest, it seemed like a good idea to me). Google, the openess poster child and acknowledged thought leader in the web space releases their client-side applications (Google Earth, Picasa, Google Desktop, etc.) as free but closed source applications. SUN moved both Solaris and Java into the Open Source space. And, there are, of course, many more examples of interesting movements in one direction or the other.
The “truth”, I think, lies somewhere between the shrillness of the cries of “Microsoft is evil” or “Open Source is evil” from opposing philosophical camps. But, “the truth”, as the X-Files fictional Agent Fox Mulder would say,” IS somewhere out there.”