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

"Savio Rodrigues has published an interesting post about the adoption of commercial open source software that brings together his thoughts about open source business models and suggests that commercial open source vendors may be heading for a glass ceiling.

So what happened to open source as a business? There was a wave of “commercial open source” companies that were going to change the world, including SugarCRM, Alfresco, Jasper, Pentaho, and ActiveGrid, a company I started in 2003 to bring open source software into businesses.

The sluggish economy is contributing to commercial open source sales, but customers still rank interoperability with proprietary software and vendor viability among their top concerns, according to a new survey from the Open Solutions Alliance.

A little over a year ago, we took a look at 10 Commercial Open Source Security Vendors. As we set out to update that list, two facts jumped out: 1) the number of open source security apps with commercial support has grown substantially and 2) the line between open source and commercial applications continues to blur.

I wrote recently that the “five ages of vendor-led open source revenue strategies” I’d come up with wasn’t suitable for vendors that build a business around community-led projects.

For Sun Microsystems, the acquisition of open-source database vendor MySQL is a positive step, giving Sun its own database and a growing, loyal community of open-source users and developers to add to its portfolio. So what's the upside or downside for the MySQL community itself?

In an open-source business, a vendor's biggest competition often derives from a freely available, "community" version of its product. By extension, an open-source vendor's biggest competition comes from the systems integrators that provide implementation services around that vendor's community software.

The open source movement remains a font of innovation to this day, and not just in the commercial sector. Numerous projects founded by universities, loosely knit communities, and individuals are exploring areas yet to be taken on by mainstream, proprietary software products.