Open source is no longer a novelty, even within the largest corporations. Today, 53% of businesses use open-source software, according to a recent CIO.com survey. However, not enough of those businesses are contributing code back to the open-source community, said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, at the Red Hat Summit.

Community journalism encourages members of the community to participate in the news process, not just as passive readers, but as active producers of the news itself. This direct connection to the product is similar in many ways to the kind of community building that goes on in open source development.

Proprietary software vendors, movie companies and the music industry aren't the only businesses that don't like pirates stealing, copying and reselling their CDs and DVDs. It turns out that pirated software can also hurt the open-source community.

Matt Asay wants Red Hat to make its Spacewalk project a true community. That’s a noble goal. But what I’ve observed over the last few years is there is a big difference between the noble goals of community and what many businesses want.

Could the open-source community use a library packaging technology that enables languages to share class libraries regardless of the language an application was written in? Probably, especially since the code to accomplish that goal was written (and shelved) more than ten years ago. All it takes to make that code available is to ask IBM to release SOM and DSOM as open-source.

The FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) Community knows, thanks to leaked Microsoft internal documents, that since about 1998 Microsoft has been in a sort of war against them. Because of this, it is not surprising that the FOSS community has looked at Microsoft with suspicion and has vilified it to no end. But, is Microsoft really evil?

If 2008 had a buzzword, it was probably community. More and more companies are looking to tap into communities for contributions to open source projects. But following the open-source trend just because everyone is doing it isn't good enough.

Phil Whitehouse of BT has written an article with twelve guidelines to build an open source community: "Some might say that open source communities "just happen", and that they operate on intuition and unwritten social rules, but this logic overlooks the vast quantity of open source projects that fail."

Australia's open source community leaders have written an open letter to Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard calling for consideration of free and open source software in the implementation of the Digital Education Revolution for the National Secondary School Computer Fund.