Open source moves at a different speed to commercial software. This has become apparent over the last decade as Linux and its Open Source fellow travelers (Apache, Open Office, MySQL, Firefox et al) gradually established their position in the software world.

In the past decade, the open source model of software
development has gained tremendous visibility and validation
though popular projects like Linux, Apache, and MySQL.
This new model, based on the “many eyes” approach, has
led to fast evolving, easy to configure software that is being used in production environments by countless commercial enterprises.

In our industry the market dominant players often have the worst products, but that’s pretty clearly not true for the Apache Foundation. The core Apache servers power the web: combining dominant market share with dominant performance and stunning software reliability - and because that combination is unusual, we have to ask why and how?

This question keeps cropping up every once in a while on different LUG lists where I lurk. It is a fairly established fact now in the FOSS world (or for that matter in the software world) that businesses can be both Open Source as well as commercial (ie: for profit). However...

While it's pretty painless to convert from commercial office software to an open source version, if you'd like to replace commercial security products with open source counterparts, you'll likely have to do some work. You may need to combine several open source tools to get the functionality you get from a single commercial product.

Monty Widenius, founder of MySQL, has said in a blog posting – "Thoughts on Dual-Licensing Open Source Software" – that he recently became aware that Sun Microsystem's OEM licence agreement for MySQL would restrict users who had signed up for the commercial licence to the open source database from modifying MySQL or using any forks of MySQL.

Anyone following the open source phenomenon can’t help but be amazed at what appears to be volunteerism on a massive scale for corporate gain. Almost every company in the world has some strands of open source code floating around their company.

So what happened to open source as a business? There was a wave of “commercial open source” companies that were going to change the world, including SugarCRM, Alfresco, Jasper, Pentaho, and ActiveGrid, a company I started in 2003 to bring open source software into businesses.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) - developers, stewards, and incubators of leading community-driven Open Source projects - announced its tenth anniversary at ApacheCon, its official user conference, trainings, and expo.