While eBay was once seen solely as the world's garage sale, it is evolving into a general commerce marketplace, and that makes auction monitoring applications all the more useful. JBidwatcher, one of the best open source eBay utilities, has just released a major update. Let's take a look.

eBay is not going through the happiest of times. Not only has it found it necessary to make 1000 people – 10% of its workforce – redundant, it has had to own up to a serious breach of trust with its Internet telephony program, Skype.

Companies that traffic in free open source software don't make their money selling licenses. They make it by selling support. What's that really worth? What does a company get for support fees?

This is not an extension, but a full firefox download specially customised for use with eBay, but it is beta so be careful. It includes features such as auction alerts from within the browser, Account Guard feature re PayPal and eBay searches from the sidebar.

OpenITWorks CEO Michael Grove contends that it is a mistake to think of commercial open source as its own business model. Instead, open source is one of many possible means to an end of making a single software business model successful -- that of selling value to customers through software. Businesses should focus their strategic planning on how to best monetize their value propositions, through open source or something else.

Recently consumer auction giant eBay announced that nearly 1,200 registered eBay users information was stolen via phishing attacks. That’s not shocking. What’s shocking is that it’s very likely the phishers were using rootkitted Linux boxes. They expected the attacks to come from Microsoft boxes. This time that’s not the case.

Free software is definitely going strong in some areas, especially in the server market. However, there are other areas where free software and free protocols have failed. Internet based voice and video communication is one of those areas.

Most software developers have little interest in entrepreneurship, but an open-source software project will survive and thrive only by delivering value into a market (users) with business partners (contributors) and against competitors (other open and closed source software). If you want to run a successful open-source project, it helps if you consider the key questions that apply when defining a commercial business model. I'll expand on Chesbrough's and Rosenbloom's list of 6 themes to demonstrate why.

In Open Source: The Model Is Broken, Stuart Cohen complains that the business model based on selling support and services around open-source software is “not meeting the expectations of investors”. In related news, the sky is failing to meet my expectations by not raining tasty soup.