I asked what role does open source play at Verizon now, especially in light of the recent SFLC lawsuit against Verizon on GPL infringement. Strigl looked at me with a blank face and asked me to repeat my question. He was completely clueless. He then asked one of his PR people to answer, and they too were clueless.

So my question is simple: Who is the open source big dog? The answer to the question as stated is likely IBM. You're welcome Savio. :-) IBM, of course, benefits nicely from its investments in Apache and Eclipse and has done a lot to make Linux what it is today. But IBM is not betting the farm on open source, so let me tweak my question to be: Who is the open source [as a business] big dog?

Adobe has announced that it is sponsoring the SQLite public domain database engine project by joining Mozilla and Symbian on the SQLite consortium. The news is interesting in that it balances Google’s recent sponsorship of efforts to support Photoshop on Linux, while it also raises an interesting question about Microsoft’s attempt to define commercial open source.

This post from Matt Asay on whether open source needs consolidation asks an interesting question, and some of the comments that came in on it were interesting. This comment caught my eye: "No. Open source does not need consolidation. Open source needs product managers."

Beyond expressing a preference, does anything else need to be done to make sure that governments that say they are going "open source" really do so?" Quotas -- dictating specific percentages of open source usage -- seem an obvious answer, but in countries that have tried them, open source has not necessarily flourished. One country where quotas on open source use have been instituted is Hungary.

"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.

I had an interesting chat yesterday with Javier Soltero, the CEO of open source web infrastructure management firm, Hyperic. We got to talking about the different attitudes to open source in the US and in Europe; you’ll recall a recent blog entry I did found slightly higher Linux desktop penetration in some European countries than in the US.

In the previous newsletter we looked at the breakdown of Linux Distributions. Many people have since asked us how open source software compares across different operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Mac, so we decided to take a look at the average number of open source packages found by operating system.

Over 12 months go I asked my readers whether open source software reduces your pirating and the result was very half-and-half. Well, this year I've asked the same question again and the results have shifted.