FOSSBazaar recently highlighted Evangelia Berdou's doctoral thesis on the differences between the contributions of paid open source developers and volunteer contributors.

FOSS adherents are happy to discuss all the reasons that open source is attractive. But the hard fact is that sometimes people try an open source application — such as yours — and they end up not using it.

I have read a few blog entries lately questioning the value of open source. The most over-the-top comes from Andy Patrizio. In his posting, titled “Big Money and Open Source May Not Compute”, Andy sounds like a school yard bully angry that his turf is finally being challenged

There's plenty of money to be made in Open Source software — something that, despite recent events, Novell, Red Hat, and a laundry-list of other OSS-loving firms can attest to. Where there often isn't much money, however, is in the hands of individual developers who donate their time to hack Open Source apps into enterprise-class offerings.

CEO Jonathan Schwartz shows patience and eloquence in explaining how a company can make lots of money by giving away IP.

Talk to any open-source vendor (myself included), and we'll tell you that there's a lot of money to be saved by dropping your proprietary software in favor of open-source alternatives. But is that always the case? And, if so, what are the necessary preconditions for saving money?

Unlike proprietary software, open source software is not developed by a single company or group of developers. Instead it is developed by many different companies, thousands of individual developers and hordes of hobbyists.

...when it comes to open source adoption, Germany has a long tradition of leading the world. For example, a study of Linux contributors by Paul Jones of iBiblio in 2000 found that Germans were the second largest contributors.

At the Utah Open Source Conference yesterday I presented a dilemma. Briefly, the idea is that as open-source buyers grow comfortable with open source they will stop spending money on open source. This leads to tragedy of the commons-type problems and a difficulty in encouraging the creation of more open source.