The economic impact of Open Source software will be discussed with parliamentarians and senior government officials on Wednesday 12th September at the Westminster eForum, held at the Palace of Westminster.

Sean Daly's telephone interview with Mark Taylor, President of the UK Open Source Consortium, October 18, 2007

This year's Open World Forum 2009, held in Paris, brought together the company heads of open source companies, public and government organisations and customers who use open source, for an exchange of views and an opportunity to map out the future of open source.

Open source may have won the argument, but that does not mean the world will now change, says Mark Taylor.

When I started to work at Lucid, it was pretty clear to me that I was new to the open source world. So I started by talking to open source luminaries. What I learned from them is that Open Source is a broad term – and not all open source is created equal.

The enterprises, vendors, developers, analysts, and journalists I speak with regularly are mostly pretty savvy about the basics of open source at this point. Even if they're not licensing geeks or otherwise expert in all the minutiae and subtle implications of open-source development, community, and usage, they generally have the important basics down.

News flash to old-school software vendors: an "API" doesn't make your product "open" and it certainly doesn't make it "open source." For the second time in two days, I've seen product marketing claiming a product was open because the vendor supplies an application program interface. Phooey.

The explanation of why zero pure play open source vendors have hit the one billion dollar revenue mark has never seemed, to me, particularly complicated. The economics of open source are fundamentally differentiated from the closed source models that preceded it.

In various markets, open source has relentlessly driven prices down while boosting performance and customer value, as detailed by The 451 Group. Even as traditional vendors have struggled with a tight economy, open-source vendors have thrived.