Open source management applications disrupted the market a few years back and some of the pioneers in the technology area continue to progress and grow their business.

That didn’t take long. The lawyers already are issuing statements over the Microsoft bid for Yahoo.

When Yahoo acquired Zimbra in September 2007, some Zimbra backers worried Yahoo would mismanage the open source email asset. Fast forward to the present, and some Zimbra proponents have gone from concern to outright panic over Microsoft’s bid to acquire Yahoo (and, by attachment, Zimbra).

As the industry grows there are a select group of business leaders that are making the industry what it is today and will be responsible for the direction and success of the industry going forward. Here are the open source business leaders who matter the most as 2008 begins.

"Mozilla Firefox continued its slow but steady march against the worldwide dominance of Microsoft Internet Explorer in 2007. Though the" [Free Software] "web browser continues to sit firmly in second place behind IE, where it's been for years, usage of Firefox is still on the rise. The browser is even threatening to tip the scales in some European countries -- most likely thanks to the rapid internationalization efforts made possible by the open-source development model..."

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.

The company plans to ship Ubuntu and Red Hat versions of its "Open Collaboration Client," a combination of Lotus Notes 8 and Symphony.

Automattic, the parent company of popular open source blogging platform WordPress, announced this week it received $29 million in funding from four investors who will take a minority stake in the company. Though this isn't the first round of financing for the not quite three-year-old company, it has drawn a lot of notice because one of the investors is the New York Times. It's an unusual pairing of two industries -- blogging and conventional media -- typically thought to be at odds with each other.