Even as Microsoft has slipped into the mainstream of open source by embedding it in its products and adopting open-source strategies for services such as customer relationship management, it continues its subversive fight against Linux.

Free and open source software continues to gain traction in the South African government with more than 90 percent of CIOs and IT managers in favour of using OSS in their departments.

Because it lacks the expensive licensing that is often the hallmark of proprietary software, open source is regularly touted as a way for IT departments to make their budget stretch a little bit further and it has already enjoyed considerable success in certain areas of the enterprise, such as web servers.

The new frontiers for open source companies are social networking-related applications and Software as a Service, said Paul Sterne, CFO of Open-Xchange. "The appetite now in the venture community is to identify companies, like ours, that sell open source products into the Software as a Service environment," he said.

Government CIOs that dismiss open source software because of support issues, which is the case for the Australian Tax Office, Defence and Centrelink, simply do not understand the concept, according to Sun Microsystems.

On Tuesday a consortium of technology companies, including IBM (IBM), will launch a new initiative designed to help shield the open-source software community from threats posed by companies or individuals holding dubious software patents and seeking payment for alleged infringements by open-source software products.

"I’m trying to wrap my head around embedding, given the on-going attempts to make the DRM font format “Embedded OpenType” a W3C web standard..."

OpenLogic provides the kind of support for open source software that many companies have come to expect with commercial software, as summed up by one of OpenLogic's bloggers:

"What we consistently hear is that companies need and want the same services for open source software that they get from proprietary software. Hence the rise of open source companies…."

I’ve talked in the past about a number of “open source” business models. There’s the MySQL “dual license” model, where all the software is available under an open license but a proprietary license can be purchased.