t amazes me that so many times people who are in charge of large and small software companies make dumb decisions. They get nice salaries but often make decisions that come back and bite them later on. One good strategy for any large or small company that is lagging behind on the Windows or Mac OS market is to create software for GNU/Linux.

Even as the global economy tanks, open-source companies continue to soar. A range of open-source companies reported sales and community growth this past week, including...

The day open source became big business is the day that open-source development exploded. Yes, open source predates the moneyed interests hankering to use it to competitive advantage, but it really wasn't until IBM dropped $1 billion on Linux that companies began paying employees to write free software.

Editor: This is a work of satire, hope you enjoy it. The heated battle between paper companies and proprietary EHR companies for market share is always fascinating to watch. Linux Medical News labs weighs in on the subject by doing a rigorous, side-by-side comparison of Paper company products vs. proprietary Electronic Health Record software company products. The results may surprise you.

According to ABI Research, a market intelligence company that specializes in global connectivity and emerging technology, Linux-based smartphone shipments will outstrip growth of the entire smartphone market in 2010. By 2015, they anticipate that the market share of Linux-enabled smartphones will be at 33%.

"Web 2.0 software-as-a-service applications built on top of the LAMP stack now generate several orders of magnitude more revenue than any companies seeking to directly monetize open source. And most of the software used by those Web 2.0 companies above the commodity platform layer is proprietary. Not only that, Web 2.0 is siphoning developers and buzz away from open source."

Every practicing programmer should read the Wikipedia article on software patents, if you haven't already. Many software companies are of the opinion that copyrights and trade secrets provide adequate protection against unauthorized copying of their innovations. Companies such as Oracle Corporation and Red Hat are therefore generally opposed to the patenting of software.

Two recent events should give for-profit companies new reasons to re-evaluate the ways in which they use open source software as well as the extent to which they use it.

Patent lawyers and software giants whom they are representing (also lawyers that become patent trolls) jeopardise emerging companies, almost all of which do not want software to be patentable