As the Internet becomes more vast open source communities need to be not only educating potential users on the benefits of open source software but also encouraging them to become part of the community.

Open source is no guarantee of freedom in the world of cloud computing. The central promise of open source software has always been to release users from vendor lock-in. With open source software, users were no longer beholden to a single vendor.

Like social Web sites, open source software is most valuable when it has a strong community around it, a community that has invested time and effort into learning the technology, creating features, submitting bug fixes, and creating documentation. Open source is also about empowering users to participate and not simply consume software.

RMS: «When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes [...] As the advocates of open source draw new users into our community, we free software activists have to work even more to bring the issue of freedom to those new users' attention.

For Sun Microsystems, the acquisition of open-source database vendor MySQL is a positive step, giving Sun its own database and a growing, loyal community of open-source users and developers to add to its portfolio. So what's the upside or downside for the MySQL community itself?

In an open-source business, a vendor's biggest competition often derives from a freely available, "community" version of its product. By extension, an open-source vendor's biggest competition comes from the systems integrators that provide implementation services around that vendor's community software.

Catalyst is a new book from Packt which helps users to design, develop, test, and deploy applications with the open-source MVC Catalyst framework. Written by Jonathan Rockway, this book will guide users through the features of Catalyst using real-world examples and systematic code snippets.

Many web applications are implemented in a way that makes developing them painful and repetitive. Catalyst is an open-source Perl-based Model-View-Controller framework that aims to solve this problem by reorganizing the web application to design and implement it in a natural, maintainable, and testable manner, making web development fun, fast and rewarding.

There is a popular notion among open source advocates that open source software will do well in a recession as enterprises seek low cost alternatives. Open source vendor Novell's CEO Ron Hovsepian (NASDAQ: NOVL) might beg to differ.

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."