Open source has infiltrated so many levels of IT over the past decade. It has been a slow process, however slowly but surely it has become a normality. And even though many companies are adopting open source software, they are hesitant to bring open source developers into the fold. Let’s take a look at some good reasons to hire open source developers.

Everywhere we turn these days, we see evidence of open source developers trading their time and hard work for little more than the hope of benefiting the ever-growing open source community.

[Dirk Riehle is] the author of The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software, a scholarly article that describes significant shifts in the software business. Datamation spoke with him about how these shifts are shaping the pay levels of open source developers.

According to market research, open-source developers rate software quality for their tools more harshly than do developers who specialize in proprietary solutions. Esther Schindler contemplates possible explanations.

Voiceroute, a software PBX vendor, originally started as a proprietary software company but went (at least partly) open source earlier this year. In this video, CEO Ming Guang Yong says the company should have moved toward open source "a lot sooner," and explains why.

With the current economic recession, open source software is a route that some enterprise developers are increasingly considering as a lower-cost alterative to proprietary solutions. However, one of the potential issues with open source software adoption is license compliance—ensuring that developers and enterprises are not in violation with a particular license.

Are open source developers on the ball about delivering alternatives to cutting-edge proprietary products and services, or do they lag the proprietary innovators? That topic came up at this week's OSCON conference in Portland, and there is a case to be made for the idea that open source developers don't deliver key products in key categories fast enough.

Local developers are helping to drum up market buzz to boost interest and expertise in open source technology across the country. Development in the mobile arena is particularly hot at the moment, among both individuals and software houses, according to Linux user groups in Singapore.

Microsoft delivers the beta of a download manager and packaged open-source applications to make it easier for Web developers to install Web products