With proprietary solutions you often get the collective knowledge of the current and past users of that software or service.

There's plenty of money to be made in Open Source software — something that, despite recent events, Novell, Red Hat, and a laundry-list of other OSS-loving firms can attest to. Where there often isn't much money, however, is in the hands of individual developers who donate their time to hack Open Source apps into enterprise-class offerings.

Over the last several years open source has grown in stature and maturity, becoming more worthy in the eyes of corporate buyers and investors. Everyone could point to Red Hat, which dominates the Linux operating system space, as the poster child for open source but few other “pure” open source companies rose up to that level.

Open APIs, not open source, will protect future freedom of action -- so beware so-called open source cloud offerings

Quite often businesses view alternatives if products or services offer better Return on Investment. Open Source is one such option that is often debated in terms of better returns, lower operational costs and of course minimum breakeven time depending on the size of your organization etc.

By now, every CIO should be aware of the enterprise potential of Linux and other popular open-source software offerings. But the number and breadth of open-source projects has increased steadily over the years, and organizations can apply these tools to virtually any type of business process.

The magazine of one of the most prominent open source development tools is hailing a Scottsdale, Arizona-based Internet site as its “Favorite Linux-Friendly Web Hosting Company.” According to the “Linux Journal,” GoDaddy.com won an annual Readers’ Choice award for working hard on its Linux hosting offerings.

The merits of the open source distribution model in generating sales leads have been well documented but it’s always good to see statistics that back up the theory. I recently talked with a new open source software vendor (who will remain nameless, although in the interests of avoiding confusion I should state it was not LoopFuse) that shared with me some statistics about its first year distributing open source code and the comparative cost of lead generation using the proprietary model.

Open-source software has found increasing acceptance within IT for infrastructure application - but many may still wonder, 'Is it possible to run a company almost entirely with open-source offerings?'