A common question you hear from proprietary vendors when dismissing open source alternatives is “how many customers actually want access to the code anyway?” It is a question I put to an open source software vendor myself earlier this week while playing devil’s advocate.

Talk about FUD. I came across a release this AM titled, "Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion," New Standish Group International Study Finds".

The land of open source software is awash in an often confusing array of various licenses and rules regarding what is and is not allowed once someone has written a piece of code. It's enough to scare some vendors away from FOSS altogether, and that can be a problem when it comes to creating open source drivers. Fortunately, some vendors are coming around.

Maybe it’s a coincidence but this week has seen evidence of tension between commercial open source vendors and elements of the open source user community. Matt Asay stirred up something of a hornet’s nest with his post questioning how open source vendors can find ways of encouraging users to contribute either code of cash in return for free software

To date, Red Hat has been one of the most financially successful Open Source vendors on Earth. The goal now though is to grow even more to hit a new financial milestone - $1 billion in revenue.

The explanation of why zero pure play open source vendors have hit the one billion dollar revenue mark has never seemed, to me, particularly complicated. The economics of open source are fundamentally differentiated from the closed source models that preceded it.

In various markets, open source has relentlessly driven prices down while boosting performance and customer value, as detailed by The 451 Group. Even as traditional vendors have struggled with a tight economy, open-source vendors have thrived.

"We looked around at the other consortiums out there; we didn't want to create another foundation just because we thought it was fun. But they were all aimed at advocating for Linux or infrastructure [tools]. No one was advocating for [vendors] that were looking to build applications for the business world,"

Given the momentum behind open source, and how it has grown through the economic downturn, it's not surprising that an increasing array of vendors is getting involved to commercialize open-source projects.