Today, credativ is launching its unique pre-paid Open Source Support Card. Businesses using Linux distributions such as Debian and CentOS stand to benefit from expert support without being tied into a contract, in contrast to other commercial Linux support vendors.

Forrester Research advises its clients who are considering open source tools to examine the so-called ecosystem around a particular product -- the pool of developers, forums, paid support and commercial versions -- to determine if there's enough support available. It notes that if an open source project has, say, 700 developers and a good ecosystem, then it's a better risk than a proprietary product from 20-person startup.

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab’s capacity to support open source projects is being expanded through a donation of $300,000 from Google. That increases the company’s cumulative support of academia's leading open source development center to $750,000.

Boxee is an Open Source cross platform media center application which is again based on another Open Source media center application called XBMC. The latest boxee comes with live news support via Livestation.

IBM is being eyed to support a national open source software center that will serve both local software companies and end-users.

The newly elected German government plans to support open standards and open source software. In its four-year coalition contract, the government led by chancellor Angela Merkel, writes it wants to orient its IT systems on open standards and include open source solutions.

OpenLogic have announced that they are expanding their commercial support services for open source packages to include CentOS Linux. The company offers indemnification for a certified range of around 500 open source packages and a choice of either Developer Support with a four hour response time during business hours or Production Support with a one hour, round-the-clock response time.

One of the biggest arguments people try to use against Open source programs is the supposed lack of support. In general I have found that support for open source programs is equal to and ofttimes better than that provided by proprietary companies.

One of the key elements that helps to enable open source software applications to gain broader enterprise usage is the availability of commercial support options. In the case of the open source MongoDB NoSQL database, that commercial support is now coming from project backer 10gen.