The purpose of open-source and the ideal which it follows is not to let people steal eachother's work, but to improve upon previous designs.

In a recent survey by Packt Publishing, 70% of software developers said that they have donated time, money, or both to open source projects. However, with large projects like Wikipedia receiving over one million dollars from just three charitable foundations last year, the question remains whether open source really needs individual contributions from developers to survive.

For many open source enthusiasts, the problem is finding the funds to help support their favorite open source projects, which include various Linux distros. It's not that we do not have the money, it's the method of forwarding the necessary funds that's the problem.

Talk to any open-source vendor (myself included), and we'll tell you that there's a lot of money to be saved by dropping your proprietary software in favor of open-source alternatives. But is that always the case? And, if so, what are the necessary preconditions for saving money?

Think open source and you might think many things, but I doubt very much that banking will be towards the top of the list or even on the radar for that matter.

This week yet another major global IT vendor will launch a product based on Linux - the HP Touchpad, which looks quite promising from early reviews. Even so, it is ironic that I still hear the following comment from a number of investors and business people:

“Open source is great, but you can’t make any money with it.”

According to Fortune, Open Source is slowly gaining acceptance in the corporate world. More and more corporates are beginning to see the merits of Open Source and have started embracing it. But all these changes didn't happened overnight. It was rather a painful journey. '

One of the things I admire about the FLOSS community is the willingness to dig in and tackle problems facing a project, whether they're technical, structural (hosting, etc.), governance, licensing, and so on. But it would occasionally be a better idea to try to recruit expertise from the outside than to try to re-invent the wheel inside each project.

For some reason, people still can't seem to get their heads around the idea that you can make money, big money, from FOSS (Free Software/Open Source). It's a pity that more of them couldn't have been in New York City this week for the O'Reilly Money:Tech conference.